But it has limits. When my wife took IMPACT training (which I recommend highly), a form of combatives training that uses full-contact against aggressors wearing full-body padding, I was talking to one of the trainers about it, and when she realized that I had some martial arts background and supported what they were doing, she asked if I would consider being a ‘mugger.’

The muggers act out realistic scenarios of assault, mugging, and rape, and in that stressful environment, the women are taught some basic and effective techniques to take the fight to the attacker.

I think it’s a great program. I’ve encouraged every women I’ve ever had a serious relationship with to go through it.

And when asked if I’d help out, I realized that I couldn’t act out those scenarios to save my life.

And today, I read of a father who has been charged with murdering his eight year old daughter and her nine year old friend.

I can’t imagine it. I can’t picture it. I know it’s real; I have enough cop friends to have heard the litany of misery and horror dished out by some adults to their children.

I don’t know what these adults – these creatures – are. I’m going to go hug my eight-year old and put him to bed now.

I’m doing updated plans and budgets for Pajamas this weekend, and one thing I’m doing (which I typically do) is adding a line for “contingency.” For something relatively inchoate, I’ll typically budget 35% above expenses for contingency; as the projects mature and we get more control over what’s going on, I’ll lower it to 15 – 20%.

Sometimes it’s enough.

But the fact that I do that, and that that’s an intelligent thing to do in most cases, is a reflection that we all understand the contingency of things – that futures depend on present-day events that we don’t completely control.Some of those things are just outside our imagination and control – “unknown unknowns” as they say. The outside world doesn’t often behave as we expect it to, and so we build in reserves of various kinds to cope. Some of those things are things we expect, but hope to avoid. Employees will misbehave, projects will fail, critical vendors will demand payment early and critical customers will make payments late.

I’ve been fairly successful in many of the projects I’ve run because I expect these things to happen, and budget for them. That doesn’t mean I want them to happen, or that I don’t spend lots of energy working to keep them from happening. But I expect to fail sometimes in my efforts.

No one who succeeds in the world, after all, expects perfection in the real things they do. Good systems and good people who operate them are good exactly because they expect imperfection, and can compensate for it and still achieve the goals they set.

There’s a broader point here…

In the Sunday LA Times, Niall Ferguson, author of “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire,” treats us to his view of World War II:

V-E Day — a Soiled Victory; A look at the WWII Allies’ moral shortcuts.

His litany is a familiar one to anyone familiar with World War II history: strategic bombing, the killing of innocents, the compromises with bloody Stalin to check bloody Hitler. But his conclusions are surprising – or ought to be, and sadly, are not.

None of this is intended to detract from the valor of the millions of Allied service personnel who lost or risked their lives in World War II. Nor is it to deny that the war had to be fought to rid the world of two of the most evil empires in all history. There is a moral difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Axis cities would never have been bombed if the Axis powers had not launched their war of aggression. And the Axis powers would have killed even more innocent people had it not been for the determination of the Allied powers to prevail.

Nevertheless, we would do well, this V-E Day, to face some harsh realities about the nature of the Allied victory — if only to remind ourselves about the nature of all wars. To win World War II, we joined forces with a despot who was every bit as brutal a tyrant as Hitler; we adopted tactics that we ourselves had said were depraved; and we left too many of those we set out to liberate firmly in the grip of totalitarianism.

For all these reasons, the victory we commemorate needs to understood for what it was: a tainted triumph.

The notion that it is ‘tainted’ – that we have acted throughout our history less than perfectly, sometimes awfully and therefore our history is tainted – underscores much of the thinking that I criticize in looking at ‘Bad Philosophy.’ It suffers from two defects in particular: it fails to ask tainted as compared to what? and it searches for and emphasizes commonality between the bad and the good by abstracting to a high level.

The first question – as compared to what? – is a critical one. I genuinely think that some people somehow believe that the world is a lab where perfect wars can be fought, or perfect legal cases made – or perfect businesses run, or perfect marriages maintained, or children can be perfectly raised. And if you can’t – if in retrospect, your parents damaged you, or the business execution was clumsy, or if a war was fought by soldiers who were on occasion brutal or if decisions were made in weakness, fear or anger that were – again in light of historical omniscience, bad – then the whole enterprise is certainly subject to question and certainly shouldn’t be celebrated.

Sadly, the legitimacy and social cohesion that societies need to ‘work’ come in some part from celebrations of their history, as awful and imperfect as it may be.

Ferguson may not care about social adhesion for this society; he may view it as beyond redemption and look forward to its collapse. He may not understand the role of history, particularly in a society like ours where ‘blood and land’ are not the roots of our self-understanding.

I do understand the role of history, and have no romantic notions about wiping our culture from the planet.

I’m not blind to the errors made and acts that can’t today be justified in World War II. But I understand them differently. I see men and women who were fallible, afraid, exhausted, enraged, and who did the best they could and whose best was thankfully damn good. I look at their mistakes as opportunities, not to criticize them from the safety of my position of retrospection, but to try and learn how we can – as we fumble through our own fallible, contingent history – learn.

Today, Tony Blair’s Labor Party is widely expected to win a plurality in Commons and keep Blair in his seat as Prime Minister.

That’s 3 – 0 for Western pro-war candidates.

Atrios may be crowing over a CNN poll showing 57% of those polled did not see the war as worth it…but in the only polls that count, the voters seem to feel differently.

And Duncan, the next time you raise the tired “chickenhawk” argument against Jonah Goldberg, I’m gonna ask you why your boss – who supports higher taxes on the rich – doesn’t just pay them.

Of course it’s a nonsensical and insulting argument, but no more nonsensical or insulting than yours.

There’s a debate going on over at Kevin Drum’s place between Dan Drezner and Marc Lynch over the role of the invasion of Iraq in the recent democratic twitchings going on in the Middle East.

It’s an amusing debate, as each side tries make a conclusive argument one way or the other. But it’s a wicked hard argument to win, as they say in Boston.

Sadly, reality is, as Rittel and Weber say, a “wicked” problem. They defined a wicked problem as:
# There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
# Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
# Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
# There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
# Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
# Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
# Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
# Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
# The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
# The planner (designer) has no right to be wrong.

And in their “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” they suggested that classical failures in planning came from assuming that problems in the wicked sphere (political reality) could be modeled and ‘rationalized’ using the methodologies that can be successful in the tame sphere (engineering).

History only runs one way.

When I came in, I sat down to buy tickets to the new Star Wars movie; I think we’ll all go see Revenge of the Sith Sunday night when Biggest Guy is back from Virginia.

And I was hit by a kind of Proustian wave of remembrance and melancholy for an old friend.

I saw the first Star Wars movie at a sneak preview, at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco. I was in grad school in Berkeley, and went with my housemate, Howard Gong, and my college friend Jan. We drove Jan’s Rabbit across the Bay Bridge against weekday traffic, as I tried to convince them that the trip was worth it, that a science-fiction movie by the guy who’d done THX1138 and American Graffiti had to be worth seeing.

We got to the theatre early, the line wasn’t too bad, and soon we were seated.

And shortly after that, we were blown away. I remember the crowd booing when Darth Vader made his appearance, striding through the clouds of steam, and the movie had us all from that point on.We started to drive back and the throttle cable on Jan’s car broke. I set the idle to 3,000 rpms and drove back slipping the clutch.

Howard died a few years ago; he needed a marrow transplant, and as an Asian, had no luck finding a donor for two years. He finally had a transplant, and got another year – besweatered, slippering around his house and children – before graft v. host killed him.

I miss him terribly, and I’ll think about him in the theater this weekend.

Life balances the good and the bad; I lost Howard, but kept Jan as a dear friend. And then she came to my wedding…

Because I can’t help myself, I’ll ask all my readers – particularly if you are Asian or another racial minority – to please go get registered in the bone marrow database. There are more Howards out there, and they have husbands, wives, children, and friends who will miss them if you don’t help.

Think of it as an additional wedding gift for Joe and Jan.

MyDD is one of the smartest Democratic political blogs around; I often disagree with specific points he makes, but if you want to understand what the folks near the seat of power at 430 South Capitol Street Southeast are thinking, you should read his blog.

Chris Bowers has a post up that I read while bleeding the brakes on TG’s motorcycle, and I was so immediately depressed that I had to put down my tools, leave the garage, and go back into the house. He criticizes Ruy Texiera’s latest on what the Democrats need to do. After taking apart framing, inoculation, unity, and mobilization as answers to what ails Democrats, Ruy says:

Sorry, Democrats, there’s just no substitute for good ideas and fresh approaches. It’s time to jettison these myths and buckle down to the real work of change–serious change–in what Democrats say to voters.

Right f**king on. I’ve bashed Ruy’s (to me, naive) belief that demographics will somehow rescue the Democratic Party in the past; but here he is speaking for me.

Sadly, Chris is speaking for the Democratic apparatchniks.

He starts with this:

Overall, however, I actually do not believe that Ruy’s solution, changing what we tell voters, is enough. I believe that our problems are even more fundamental than our message, and in a post-national consensus era are directly tied to the ideological gap between conservatism and liberalism. We can talk about message and framing and mobilization and unity and reform and elect ability until the cows come home, but quite frankly I believe that Democrats are losing elections before they begin because of the general ideological composition of the electorate and of the nation.

In other words, we’re losing because most of the country doesn’t agree with us. His plan?

As far as I can tell, the main problem facing Democrats is that conservatives, when compared to liberals, have superior organizational control and power over what Louis Althusser famously called Ideological State Apparatuses and what on this blog I have taken to calling ideological conversion machines. To put this another way, I believe that conservatives are largely in control of those mechanisms that determine an individual’s ideological outlook, which these days is largely determinative of how an individual ends up voting. I believe that our problems are growing particularly severe when it comes to four specific ideological machines:

Education…

Labor…

Media…

Religion…

So, basically, if we can gain control of these four tactical objectives, we can change the imprinting that individuals get and thus how they vote.

What deterministic horseshit.

If you want to know why David Gelernter’s “We’re Smart, You’re Dumb” article in the LA Times was so dead-on, read this. Chris and his ilk know better then voters do what they should believe, and plan to change the social frameworks that determine their beliefs so that voters will then believe as they should.

It’s not enough to make me a conservative, but it’s sure close.

Let’s go back to school, and John Schaar, and “The Case for Patriotism”:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

Chris, go read that and come back to us, will you?

Got an email from my Congresswoman, Jane Harman (who, by the way, voted for the horrible bankruptcy bill). One of the links is to the results of her constituent survey about Social Security.

Question #2 asks “Right now income over $90,000 is exempt from Social Security taxes. Do you think people should or should not have to pay Social Security taxes on income over $90,000?”

71% say “yes.”

Sign me up…oh, I already did.

TAPPED ran a contest for the best “elevator pitch” for liberalism, and just put up the winning entry:

Liberals believe our common humanity endows each of us, individually, with the right to freedom, self-government, and opportunity; and binds all of us, together, in responsibility for securing those rights.

Can someone can tell me why that wouldn’t work as a motto for the AEI??

This falls into the category of “what were they thinking?”

Look. Liberalism is about using the power of government to make sure that the powerless get a fair deal. There’s obviously a useful and important set of arguments to make over what “fair” looks like. But if this – combined with laughable Lakoff-ian attempts at rhetorical devices – are what the Democrats plan on running under, I’m wondering exactly how old I’ll be before Democrats start winning national races again.

OK, reader TM Lutas was kind enough to use his mad OCR skillZ to provide a text version of the NCTC doc. I ran it through a fast parsing, and pulled the # of incidents by country out.

Not much changed from the limited sample I did earlier.

|Iraq | 30.8%|
|Afghanistan | 2.8%|
|subtotal =| 33.6%|
|||
|India | 45.9%|
|||
|Israel/ Palestine| 8.4%|
|||
|TOTAL |87.9%|
If we’re asking ourselves if terrorism is a worldwide or localized phenomenon, this certainly suggests that it’s highly localized. Two countries that are being pacified post-invasion; one country in a territorial/religious dispute with a neighbor; and Israel/Palestine which is also in a kind of territorial dispute.

The interesting note would be to localize the attacks within India and come to a conclusion about how concerned all the folks doing offshoring ought to be. Amusingly, my wife was v. upset when I got invited to go to Iraq last year; but I don’t doubt that she would have let me go to India without a thought.

Two things to follow up with; I’ll add casualties and am probably going to do a piece on the role of attention and perception in evaluating these numbers.

Full list by country:

|Country|Incidents|Percent|
|Afghanistan|18|2.8%|
|Angola|1|0.2%|
|Argentina|1|0.2%|
|Bangladesh|1|0.2%|
|Bolivia|1|0.2%|
|Bosnia|1|0.2%|
|Chile|1|0.2%|
|Columbia|2|0.3%|
|Democratic Republic of the Congo|1|0.2%|
|Egypt|2|0.3%|
|France|3|0.5%|
|Germany|1|0.2%|
|Greece|2|0.3%|
|Haiti|2|0.3%|
|India|300|45.9%|
|Indonesia|1|0.2%|
|Iraq|201|30.8%|
|Israel|15|2.3%|
|Malaysia|1|0.2%|
|Mexico|1|0.2%|
|Nepal|10|1.5%|
|Pakistan|3|0.5%|
|Palestine|40|6.1%|
|Philippines|2|0.3%|
|Russia|5|0.8%|
|Saudi Arabia|12|1.8%|
|Serbia|2|0.3%|
|Somalia|1|0.2%|
|Spain|2|0.3%|
|Sri Lanka|1|0.2%|
|Sudan|5|0.8%|
|Thailand|3|0.5%|
|Turkey|4|0.6%|
|Ukraine|1|0.2%|
|United Kingdom|1|0.2%|
|Uzbekistan|2|0.3%|
|Venezuela|3|0.5%|

Bryan Berkett worked for me at Spirit of America, and then left to move back to New York City. A Jewish kid from Beverly Hills, he worked with a Palestinian friend from college to start Shurush, which started as an ad-hoc charity giving out microfinance loans to Palestinians.

I’m an immense believer in microfinance. The “Grameen Bank” type solutions have been shown to work, and the dense social webs that they use and build on not only build economies, but societies as well.

They are working to build a real endowment and take their organization to the next level of stability.

So they are looking for donors, large and small.

A Palestine occupied with entrepreneurial activity would be one that would have very little patience for terrorism. And Palestinians who were personally involved in making their lives better are unlikely to lash out in psychotic rage.

I’m a supporter of Shurush – which means ‘roots’ both in Hebrew and Arabic. If you sent them a few bucks today, that would be good news, too.