The SkyBox State Meets The Nanny State

Not too far from where I live, there is a series of bluffs above the beach and bicycle path that are often used by remote control glider pilots. I’ve had a couple of close calls with them, but given the nature of the beast – fragile balsa and mylar or foam gliders weighing very little, I thought little of it.

But apparently a glider pilot hit the wrong person this week.

In today’s Daily Breeze:

A few residents, including a city planning commissioner, have asked the Redondo Beach City Council to ban the activity because the planes sometimes go out of control and hit homes, cars and pedestrians in the heavily trafficked area.

Lenore Bloss, a planning commissioner, asked the council earlier this month to consider an ordinance outlawing the craft in the city after she was hit in the back of the head by a low-flying plane. Though she wasn’t hurt, Bloss was outraged. Not only was there a possibility of real injury, but the pilot didn’t apologize.

Her story got the council’s attention. Councilman Gerard Bisignano said the matter will be taken up within six weeks.

“People do get hit and I don’t deny that,” Freschi said. “But to my knowledge no one has been seriously hurt. It stings and it smarts. But no blood, no broken bones.”

He makes an analogy that dogs bite and bicycles run into people. But these beach activities aren’t banned; laws are passed to make the activities safer.

First, I need to disclose that I do not and have never flown remote controlled airplanes. My sons have not flown remote controlled airplanes. I do often use the Esplanade and bike path near there, so I ought to be on the side of the angels and support banning the damn things. And hell, I’m a liberal, so regulation must be good, no?

In this case, no.

Boy, I have so many problems with this.

First of all, it fits nicely in with my view of the SkyBox nature of our process. A planning commissioner gets hit – and her feelings, not her scalp are wounded. So A Law Must Be Passed So That They Learn A Lesson. Bull.

Second, I’ve got to ask, where’s the real risk? Kids play frisbee on the beach all the time, and the wind catches them…I’ve been hit by those. I’ve been clocked by an errant volleyball. Should we ban those? Of course not.

Third, the notion that the city would ban the activity – rather than make any effort to reasonably figure out how to make it workable, when it’s been done there for 40 years or more – sticks in my throat. The City Attorney says:

“City Attorney Jerry Goddard said enforcing such restrictions could be costly and difficult. Banning the gliders would be the easiest, cheapest alternative.

“I have to say, reluctantly, that the level of use of The Esplanade and beach area has reached the congestion point where regulation is necessary,” Goddard said.

“I’m saddened by that. Mainly because I’m disappointed at the ever growing level of government regulations over citizens’ lives. And I’m also disappointed in the irresponsibility of people to do anything from walking their dog on a leash to flying a model airplane in a responsible fashion.”

Goddard said that in his 11 years as city attorney an adult or child, car or house has been hit by a glider about every two years.

Sorry, Jerry, but one reported accident every two years isn’t evidence of irresponsibility, and while I think you’re on the right track about intrusive regulation, saying you’re against it while proposing it seems kind of disingenuous.

Personally, I think there are probably some simple and easily enforceable rules – like don’t fly on summer weekends or holidays after 9 or 10:00 am – which would lessen the chances of conflict and keep the pilots flying.

Personally, I think Redondo is a small enough town that those affected by the flying could walk up the hill and personally interact with the glider pilots and work something out informally.

But that might be too simple.

Mayor Greg Hill, Councilmember Gerard Bistango, and City Manager Lou Garcia are the ones who ought to think about this. One might hope that they’d come to the conclusion that this is silly and embarrassing, and that the City has more pressing business.

Jan. 21st Event: Want to be on TV??

RE: Spirit of America volunteer project loading supplies for Iraqi civilians at USMC Camp Pendleton.

TV Opportunity: If you’re an insomniac, or live near Oceanside, California, FOX News will be at the meetup place (in the Camp Pendleton parking lot by the main gate) at 6:00am and want to do some live feeds at 6:50, 7:50 at 8:00 and then a final live shot at 8:20am.

We’d love to have a dozen or so earlybirds there, so if you can, move your alarms up!!

Directions: Here’s a link to a PDF map of the area. Page 2 is a map of Southern California. Take the Camp Pendleton Exit on Rt. 5 just N of Oceanside.

Volunteers will meet at the main gate parking lot no later than 9:00 a.m. to be escorted to the event.

What we’ll be packing: $50,000 worth of toys, school supplies, & medical supplies. See full details here. Note that people who can’t or shouldn’t lift things won’t have to.

Time Commitment: Volunteers should be prepared to help until 1:00 pm. If possible, we may need them longer. We’ll provide lunch.

We’ll be leaving Casa de Armed Liberal at 5:30am, so I ought to be there around 7:30am or so.

Before I Taunt You A Second Time

TG had to drop her bike at the shop this morning, so I took the car to pick her up and bring her home. In the car, we tend to listen to CD’s on the changer, but I pulled them to restock with fresh music, so we wound up listening to the radio on the way back.

As I’ve noted in the past, I tend to see the radio as a cultural periscope.

What it showed this morning wasn’t good for Dean.

One of our buttons is KROQ, the local corporate alt-rock station. The morning show is personality-driven, with Kevin and Bean as the two core DJ’s, and their sidekicks Ralph and Lisa.

And they talked about Dean.

Dean’s speech last night got some comments around the blogs, but we hadn’t seen or heard it. Until they played it on KROQ, with the DJ’s laughing and exclaiming in the background. At the end of his speech, Dean cut loose with what was supposed to be a rousing yell, I guess, but his hoarseness and the fervor with which he spoke strangled it into a fairly funny-sounding squawk.

And the DJ’s played the squawk several times as punctuation, laughing each time.

Campaigns can survive a lot of setbacks, but when the candidates are being mocked, it’s a Bad Thing.

71% Reporting, Kerry 38%, Dean 18%

Well, it appears that we have a primary contest.

I’ve been listening to and reading a lot about the electoral handicapping over the last few weeks, and have to say that I’m befuddled, as are most of the experts, I think.

I was right there with Kaus in predicting Kerry’s withdrawal, so I don’t even get to affably mock him for it.

Since I’m pretty convinced that this election is going to be train wreck for my party, I’ve kind of averted my gaze. But that’s not remotely the right thing to do, and I need to dig in and figure out where I stand.

Dammit.

Bizarro L.A. Times?

In the last week, there are been two op-eds that could be construed as being pro-gun.

Did someone slip a fake copy onto my driveway??

In today’s op-eds, Walk Softly and carry a Big Gun, a commentary by an Alaska resident who asks:

I am puzzled now by the strange way people here are dealing with mountain lions … which is to say, letting them kill you.

And last week, Diana Wagman went shooting:

Guns are bad. All my life, it’s been that simple. At my son’s preschool, if a child pointed a banana and said “bang,” he was admonished to “use the banana in a happier way.”…

So what would make someone like me change my mind? I met this gun enthusiast. As research for my new novel, I asked him many questions, all the while voicing my disgust. My character might use a gun, but I never would. “Come to the range,” the gun guy said. “I’ll teach you to shoot.”

Hmmm… Go figure.

UPDATE: Suman Palit is adopting the same approach.

MLK Day

Today’s the day the we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I’m damn glad we do.

When we talk about race today, we talk about the scandal at the King/Drew medical center, or about the 19th Century racial politics of Al Sharpton. It’s an annoyance to many and should be an embarrassment to some.

But in my lifetime, young black solders in uniform were denied accommodations and meals. In my lifetime, black families – who had worked, lived and owned land in communities for two generations, were explicitly denied the right to vote.

In my lifetime civil rights workers – whose crime was to seek the same rights for people with black skin – were brutally murdered, with the complicity of the white police who were sworn to protect them.

To understand where we really are, and where we are going, it’s important to have some sense of where we came from.

Rev. King may not have been a perfect man – no one is.

But he and his movement are models we should not forget.

That’s 9:00 AM at Camp Pendleton, in Oceanside CA

I know I keep bringing this up, but it’s really ‘good news’ and so great to post on a Saturday.

We’ll need you on Wednesday, Jan. 21st… because here’s what Jim Hake of www.spiritofamerica.net has managed to get together for the Marines to bring with them to Iraq!!

* About $50,000 raised
* In kind contributions, price reductions and goods donations of ~$150,000

With that $50,000 or so we’ve bought:

* 15,000 (2 tons) imprinted frisbees

* Supplies for 10,000 school supply bags, incl 10,000 each of:
– imprinted tote bags
– box of 12 pencils
– bag of 10 ballpoint pens
– pack of 10 colored markers
– wirebound notebook

* 4 pallets of medical supplies

* More med. equipment and supplies for 200 damn nice kits/packages for clinics and doctors

* 800 duffel type travel bags for Iraqi police and medical personnel

Folks, we’ll need enough people to assemble and pack 10,000 supply bags!! Bring a friend…

Terrorism as a Binary Agent

Well, I’m almost above water. And I’ve been reading and rereading Jeffrey Record’s article blasting the Bush WoT policies, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just can’t buy his arguments about Iraq. And yes, I know he’s a respected academic in the field, and I’m a pseudonymous blogger. Here’s the crux of my disagreement.

The critical point he makes is this:

Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. One does not doubt for a moment that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a deliverable nuclear weapon, would have used it on 9/11. But the record for rogue states is clear: none has ever used WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage. Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from employing such weapons against either U.S. forces or Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such weapons sometime later in the decade.48 For its part, North Korea, far better armed with WMD than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea and the United States but has yet to initiate one. How is the inaction of Saddam Hussein and North Korea explained other than by successful deterrence?

There is no way of proving this, of course, but there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear weapon; if anything, rogue state regimes see in such weapons a means of deterring American military action against themselves. Interestingly, Condolezza Rice, just a year before she became National Security Adviser, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of dealing with Saddam. In January 2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to Iraq, that “the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence–if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” She added that rogue states “were living on borrowed time” and that “there should be no sense of panic about them.” If statelessness is a terrorist enemy’s “most potent protection,” then is not “stateness” a rogue state’s most potent strategic liability?

Once you acknowledge that state actors can be deterred, his answer becomes simple

Traditionally, however, war has involved military operations between states or between a state and an insurgent enemy for ultimate control of that state. In both cases the primary medium for war has been combat between fielded military forces, be they regular (state) or irregular (nonstate) forces. Yet terrorist organizations do not field military forces as such and, in the case of al-Qaeda and its associated partners, are trans-state organizations that are pursuing nonterritorial ends. As such, and given their secretive, cellular, dispersed, and decentralized ‘order of battle,’ they are not subject to conventional military destruction. Indeed, the key to their defeat lies in the realms of intelligence and police work, with military forces playing an important but nonetheless supporting role.

In detail, it looks like this:

Intelligence-based arrests and assassinations, not divisions destroyed or ships sunk, are the cutting edge of successful counterterrorism. If there is an analogy for the GWOT, it is the international war on illicit narcotics.

There’s lots more, and you ought to read his work. (personally, I think there are some other large holes in it, as in his inability – or unwillingness – to distinguish guerilla warfare from terrorism:

Terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a form of irregular warfare, or “small war” so defined by C. E. Callwell in his classic 1896 work, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, as “all campaigns other than those where both sides consist of regular troops.” As such, terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a weapon of the weak against a “regular” (i.e., conventional) enemy that cannot be defeated on his own terms or quickly. Absent any prospect of a political solution, what options other than irregular warfare, including terrorism (often a companion of guerrilla warfare), are available to the politically desperate and militarily helpless? Was Jewish terrorism against British rule in Palestine, such as the 1946 Irgun bombing attack (led by future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Menachem Begin) on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (killing 93, including 17 Jews),19 justified as a means of securing an independent Jewish state? “Terrorism may be the only feasible means of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship, the last resort of free men and women facing intolerable persecution,” argues Laqueur. “In such conditions, terrorism could be a moral imperative rather than a crime–the killing of Hitler or Stalin early on in his career would have saved the lives of millions of people.”

Note that assassinating Hitler or Stalin – even in their early political career – would be guerilla warfare – an attack on the troops or political structure of the state. I think that he misses the key definitions of terrorism as I understand it:

If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don’t advocate this, Ann, please don’t get any ideas…). You’d be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you’d be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.

He buys into the notion of terrorism as an extension of warfare by irregular means. I don’t.

But there’s a deeper blindness in his piece which keeps me from stepping back from my current positions; a simple argument which he misses and which is central to my view.

Here’s the rub.

As I’ve noted in the past, I personally believe that terrorism will be here for as long as we’re struggling with ‘Bad Philosophy’. We will continue to see essentially random acts ranging from ‘mucking’ to Murrah. But the scale and threat posed by that level of terrorism will be relatively low, and the actors will be highly vulnerable to traditional police work (as were the recently-arrested Texas terrorists), unless they are backed by something that controls resources on the scale of a small state or large multinational corporation.

I can get five friends together and blow up a bridge (and I have just the friends to do it, too…). But to do something at the kind of scale that 9/11 represented takes more than the willingness to die for my cause.

Hezbollah can supply the bodies, but it is the cash supplied by that Iranians, Saudis, and (formerly) Iraqis that pays for the staff and infrastructure to educate children in the ways of hate and feed them until they become murderous adults. It is national governments that allow terrorist organizations to build camps to house and train their recruits, and provide the stable living conditions that allow the leadership the time and space to plan and organize.

The kind of terrorism that we need to be worried about is a binary agent. It requires both the kind of human actors that can be found or created in many places, but to make their actions something other than self destructive paroxysms of rage, it takes tacticians, resources, training, and weapons that need to be provided at a larger – national – scale.

And that’s the fear of what a nuclear-armed Iraq or North Korea might do. Not that they would use the weapons directly – because, after all, if they do they’re done for. But that they may find ways to place the weapons in the hands of those who could use them in ways that they might deny.

Using his model of the ‘War on Drugs’ is informative; as long as there are states which are essentially captive to narcotics cartels – say, Panama – it is impossible to stop the flow of drugs. As long as there are states which use terrorist armies as proxies, we will not be safe.

The answer is, I believe to simultaneously do three things:

1) work to dry up state support for terrorism as aggressively as we can;
2) improve our ability to detect and respond to terrorist activities internally;
3) fight ‘Bad Philosophy’. This is one that’s going to take some doing…

On Jan. 21st, Spirit of America Needs YOU!

I’ve been working to point people to Jim Hake of www.spiritofamerica.net, who is working – among other things, on putting together some materiel for a Marine division headed back to Iraq to hand out to Iraqi civilians. So far he’s gathered mostly school supplies, low-level medical equipment, and some toys.

The first $50,000 worth is going to be delivered to Camp Pendleton here in Southern California next Wednesday, January 21st. He needs about 40 volunteers to help unload and assemble this stuff, which the Marines will put into a shipping container and take with them.

So if there’s a chance that you can spend Wed. at Camp Pendleton, it’d be hugely helpful. Here are the details:MEET AT 9:00AM

Take the Camp Pendleton Exit on Rt. 5 just north of Oceanside. Volunteers will meet at the main gate parking lot no later than 9:00 a.m. to be escorted to the event.

WORK INVOLVED

Volunteers will be:

* Assembling school supply kits, putting pencils, pens and notebooks in tote bags
* Assembling medical supply bags, putting sm. equipment and supplies in bags and boxes.
* Moving boxes into containers.

People who can’t lift things won’t have to.

TIME COMMITMENT

Volunteers should be prepared to help until 1:00 pm. If possible, we may need them longer. We’ll provide lunch.

I’ll be there, and hope some other folks can be as well. More details here.

Ace In the Hole: Photo Gallery

We imagined the moment in “Saddam Haiku,” but even that wasn’t as sweet as the real thing. These photos come from a source who shall remain anonymous. If many of the faces look blurred, it’s because we blurred them to protect identities. We also reduced the file sizes to 20-48k for faster downloading. Enjoy!

* The Ace in the Hole
* The Money Shot
* Home Sweet Home
* Welcome Home Party
* Down and Out in Tikrit Hills (a true classic!)

UPDATE: Better versions of these photographs are up now; we found ways to preserve everyone’s identity without altering or shrinking the photos as much. Meanwhile, if you want a comprehensive round up of developments in Iraq, visit our Jan. 19th Iraq Report – part of our regular Winds of War briefings.