Well, as always, I’m following the Tour de France pretty closely. Today was a huge day for Lance Armstrong as he sets out to win his unprecedented sixth Tour – he now leads his closest opponents by over two minutes and he has made a clear statement that can’t help but challenge Ullrich and Hamilton’s confidence.

And for all those you join me in yelling “Go, Lance!”, here’s an article about how Lance…goes…

On any given stage, however, watch for the helicopter shots; the wide-angle full-peloton views that can’t help but show it all. At the edge of your TV screen and at the back of the pack, you might spot a rider — sometimes solo, sometimes braced by a hand-on-the-back from a teammate — coasting close to the roadside, his torso turned slightly askew.

Is he doing what you think he’s doing? “Yes,” says Danny Nelissen, Eurosport’s Dutch cycling commentator and a former eight-year veteran of the pro peloton.

So maybe I should follow less closely…

For good Tour coverage, I’d go to the TDF Blog, and to Velonews.

More later, including comments on the spat between LeMond and Armstrong, and the story of my honest-to-God lunch with Eddy Mercx and Jacques Anquetil.

Well, I tip my toe back into blogging (and reading blogs), and I find that Matt Yglesias has once again written the thing that makes me go “Huh?” today.

I imagine that after another attack people will still feel, on a gut level, like we ought to retaliate, but there really won’t be anything to be done. Just as Australia and Indonesia didn’t respond after Bali, and Spain didn’t respond after the Madrid attacks, if someone blows up Grand Central Station there’s not really going to be much of anything we can do in response. A lot of people, myself included, would find that pretty unsatisfying on an emotional level, but it’s hard to see any reasonable policy options.

There are so many things wrong with this…Let’s start. Factually, things certainly were done after Bali and the Spanish railroad bombings – as I assume Matt knows. Some good police work went into arresting Abderrameb Hammadi Afandi, and pursuing Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet until he committed suicide. In Bali, Imam Samudra is awaiting execution for his leadership of the attack.

So he’s obviously talking about a military – as opposed to legal – ‘something’. And the problem is, on what planet do we imagine that we can arrest these guys and try them faster than they are recruited? Recruited – in large part, I’ll bet, by watching videos of the successful operations carried out by their predecessors. Note that more successful attacks in Israel seem to lead to more attackers; the successful attacks themselves are the advertisement.

When my kitchen sink is full of ants, killing the ants I see is primally satisfying, but doesn’t do much to stop the colony from sending more.

At some point, you have to disrupt the system that makes people like this, and the systems that recruit, train, and organize them. That’s difficult to do in general, and effectively impossible to do when they have states that are willing to shelter and succor them.

That’s the core difference, I think, between Matt’s philosophy on these things, and mine.

There’s another difference, and simply put, it’s that I see Matt’s success as driven in large part because he articulates – very well – the beliefs and thoughts of a certain group within the Democratic Party and the left. And when I read the quote above, as a Democrat, I cringe. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of Michael Dukakis’ response to Bernard Shaw. And I don’t think that’s going to play any better this time than it did then.

An interesting new-to-me blog, ‘Global Guerillas.’ by John Robb. Followed a link from DefenseTech, which led to an interesting post on the mechanisms of emergent action by ant colonies, bloggers, and (claims the writer) terrorists.

Stigmergy is a term used in biology (from the work of french biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse) to describe environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors (for example, ants use pheromones to create trails and people use weblog links to establish information paths, for others to follow). The term is derived from the greek words stigma (“sign”) and ergon (“to act”). Stigmergy can be used as a mechanism to understand underlying patterns in swarming activity. As such, it can be applied to the understanding of the swarming attacks of diverse global guerrilla groups.

I’m intrigued, but not yet completely sold on this, but it’s definitely a writer worth reading, and a set of concepts worth pursuing.

UPDATE: As usual, our comments section kicks the discussion up another notch or two – esp. “Laocoon” and team member Robin Burke.

Blogger John Emerson, of ‘Seeing the Forest‘ is raising a bet about the coming election. His (original) bet is:

I’m willing to bet $50 at 30-to-one that we’ll see problems in the 2004 Presidential election as bad or worse than those in the 2000 election. Your $1500 says everything will be OK, my $50 says that there will be major problems — as bad as or worse than 2000.

He later tightened it to:

You are betting that none of the following will happen:

1. Whoever is in office on Jan. 21, 2004 is not there because he’s been elected. Either Bush stays in, or a caretaker is appointed.

2. The November election does not take place as scheduled, but is postponed.

3. In a significant number of states (greater than the margin of victory) the vote in the electoral college is not based on a count of the votes (for example, the state legislature intervenes).

4. Some unprecedented intervention decides the election, as in 2000.

5. Major branches of government openly defy President Kerry and refuse to obey his orders.

I’ve left out the “denial of legitimacy” point because there’s a 100% chance that many conservatives will not accept President Kerry’s legitimacy. [Ed. – would have been a nice touch if he’d added ‘…as many liberals have not accepted Bush’s.’]

So what do I think? I think it’s a sucker bet, because – having seen that the courts and formerly ministerial process of vote-counting are now up for grabs – both sides are certainly making plans for their post-election campaigns.

Unless it is a blowout election (which is possible, but not likely) both sides will launch stiff administrative and legal campaigns around the voting and vote-counting process, which means there’s a significant chance that the results will be delayed, and that the decision will be made at some level in the judicial system.

This ignores the very real possibility of an election-eve terrorist attack. The U.S. isn’t Spain, and the immediate emotional reaction to such an attack is as likely to be Jacksonian as it is to be more isolationist. While I don’t think that delaying the elections in such an event is a good idea (unless critical communications infrastructure is somehow down, making it hard to actually run the election), I’ll bet that the losing side will be in court after such an election claiming that the election should have been delayed – thereby delaying the outcome.

So let’s do a four-way matrix:

Close election + attack = challenge & delay (he wins)
Close election = challenge & delay (he wins)
Blowout + attack = challenge & delay (he wins)
Blowout = no effective challenge (he loses)

So if you think the odds of a major attack are high, and the odds of a close election are high – his 30:1 odds suddenly don’t look so good. And it isn’t because of some nefarious plan by the Trilateral Commission (kidding!!) to create a theological dictatorship (anyone read Heinlein?), it’s the natural development of a litigious, rules-based political process where shame is nonexistent and voters appear to have short memories (if the political class had shame, they wouldn’t do this – think of Nixon’s response to the 1960 Chicago results, and if voters had memories they’d punish candidates who ‘gamed’ the system).

This makes the issues of voting process and vote-counting (up to now the province of true election geeks) something we need to address in a serious way in terms of the technology, the administrative procedures, and the legal wrapping around it. Hmmm…

Hi!! Remember me?

I’ve missed this; more commentary and news may follow, time permitting. But I’ve run into something too interesting not to share, partly in the hopes that someone else may be able to look more closely at the small connection I’m seeing and explore how much substance is contained there. And at its core, I think there is a gem of such good news that I stopped reading and started typing this right away.

Last year, in writing about terrorism and philosophy, I made the claim that modern Islamism was deeply influenced by Western political philosophers (and, I claimed, by the Romantic movement that could claim a descendent in Nazism). This came from some peripheral references in the chunks of Qutb I read that made me think of Fanon, and by the close fit of Fanon’s Romantic beliefs into the worldview of radical Islamists.

Well, to quote one of my favorite books – “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” It turns out that the connection may be more direct than my casual fantasies.I picked up Bernard Lewis’ collection of essays ‘From Babel to Dragomans‘ and have been working through it in my odd moments. One of his essays, on Pan-Arabism, makes the following connections:

…the first theoretical statement of pan-Arabism is the work of a certain ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (?1849 – 1902), nowadays generally regarded as the ideological pioneer of pan-Arabism…He is principally remembered for two books, both of which were attacks on the Ottoman Sultanate in general and on the reigning Sultan, Abdulhamid II, in particular…The second [book], entitled Umm al-Qura (The Mother of Cities, i.e. Mecca)…is hardly more original than the other [Lewis suggests that Kawakibi’s first book was a hash of Della Tirannide, by Alfieri], being to a large extent a reflection of the views expressed by the English Romantic poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt in his book The Future of Islam, published in 1881 and setting forth the idea of an Arab Caliphate.

Bin-Laden’s core philosophy is thus the restoration of something that never was – an Arab (as opposed to Turkish) Caliphate. Something suggested originally by a British Romantic poet. The philosophical lineage is there; now it just needs to be explored. Blunt’s book is at the UCLA library, and sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go pick it up and report.

But we’re not done yet.

Lewis continues:

The second intellectual precursor of pan-Arabism was another Syrian, this time a Christian, Negib (Najib) Azoury (birthdate unknown – died 1916). Azoury was a Maronite or Uniate Catholic Christian who studied in Istanbul and Paris and later became a provincial official in Jerusalem. He left his post in unknown circumstances and seems to have been condemned to death in absentia in 1904, when he fled to Paris. In the following year, he published a book, Le reveil de la nation arabe. He spent most of the remaining years of his life in Paris, where he formed an organization – probably a one-man show – called the ‘Ligue de la patrie arabe’ … The name, it has been remarked is reminiscent of the anti-Drefusard ‘Ligue de la patrie francaise’, which flourished in the late eighteen nineties. His writings reflect the anti-Semetic obsessions with worldwide Jewish power which were current in anti-Dreyfusard circles…

So the roots of Islamist thought can be seen as going back to the salons of London and cafes of Paris. That matters, both because it shows that the philosophy we’re fighting against is a relatively recent one – this isn’t thousands of years old – and that it had other paths to follow:

The new and significant elements in Kawakibi’s writings are 1) his clear and explicit rejection of the Ottoman Caliphate; 2) his insistence on the Arabic-speaking peoples as a corporate entity with political rights of its own and 3) most radical of all, his idea of a spiritual Caliphate which would presumably leave politics and government to a secular authority separate from religious authority and law, entirely within the scope of human decision and action.
(emphasis added)

That last is why I’m posting this on a Good News Friday.

Because I believe this demonstrates that there are roots in Islam – in recent Islam – that we need to water and cultivate as a part of creating our own ‘Good Philosophy’ antibodies to Bad Philosophy. That won’t be easy, but I’ll suggest that we have to try.

I’ve been working with a bunch of people on Spirit of America, including Jeff Jarvis. In New York last week, getting ready for Jim Hake’s trip to Iraq (he’s there now) we set out some principles we thought would help organize this as quickly and effectively as we’d like and is necessary.

One of them was ‘absolute transparency’.

That put me in a bit of a bind, because as someone behind a pseudonym – or someone who has done a lot around these issues from behind a pseudonym, I wouldn’t be keeping that commitment.

So in talking to Dan Gillmor, for his column in today’s Mercury-News, I made a decision.

“Ollie-Ollie Oxen Free,” is how the kids put it.

My name is Marc Danziger, I live in the Los Angeles area, and I am the new C.O.O. for Spirit of America. We have BIG plans in store, and the blogosphere will play an important role.

More to come later….

You may have noticed that my posting has been light in the past week. Some of you may even find that a good thing … <g>

But, as happens with bloggers sometimes, things in my material life have changed, and those changes – which are all good, and in fact even more than good – mean that I need to take a break from blogging for a while.

I have an opportunity to work on a project that is too interesting and challenging to pass up. I expect it to be fairly all-consuming, which means I’ll have less time than I do now. And because it is peripherally in the public sphere, I need to think carefully about how it would interact with what I write for my own amusement and education here.

I may be back in a week or so. I may just toss something out once a month or so. I may even see if I can merge my real and electronic selves. I may not. Don’t know yet.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in these discussions; thanks especially to those who disagreed and made me think and study harder, and sometimes even change my mind. Keep it up while I’m gone. And, as I usually ask:

Please don’t kill anyone or blow anything up while I’m away.

An email and photos sent to Spirit of America, from Lt. Col. Colin McNease, USMC. From Fallujah. Looks like our earlier efforts (big thanks to all attendees) are beginning to pay off on the ground:

We went out to the village where the tank got stuck, about 3 km northeast of Fallujah. The area is a dirt road farming village of concrete or mud brick houses strung along a single road which runs from a cemetery to a ‘T’ intersection. The people have gotten to know the Marines since the tank spent a week there before we could pull it out. They were friendly to the Marines who already felt bad about trashing their canals and fields while trying to unstick the M1A1. When we went out to pay damage claims for all the lost crops and date palm trees and torn up roads, we saw a lot of kids around and met a few of them. This made us think of the SoA stuff, especially the soccer balls and frisbees, we had been sent and had back on Camp Fallujah.

The next time we went to visit the village, we took as many of the soccer balls and frisbees as we could find into the open space in the back of our hummers (around chow, water, ammunition, radio batteries, etc.) When we arrived at the village and parked the HMMVWs in the center, some shy but curious kids were peeking out from doorways or looking out their windows. But when we pulled out the soccer balls and handed the first one out, they started coming out like ants to a picnic.

None of them wanted frisbees at first, all really wanted the soccer balls. But when we ran out of soccer balls and kept handing out frisbees they would line up to take them, sometimes trying to get more than one, and many making sure their little brothers or sisters got one as well. They didn’t know what to make of the frisbees at first, holding and throwing them like dinner plates, but once they had a little professional military education on how to operate the frisbee and were checked out on it, a lot of them became surprisingly good surprisingly quickly. I spent almost 45 minutes tossing the disc with one very young girl who got to be quite accomplished.

Some of the kids’ parents and some of the older kids who could read did pick up on the friendship message and would point to the English and then point to the Arabic and give us a thumbs up to show that they understood that they meant the same thing in both our languages.

This took place at a time when we were being shot at in most every other place we went so it was particularly gratifying, and it was nice to have something good to give them. Other things they seem particularly crazy about are sunglasses (they always want ours) and colored pens.

A big thanks to all of the bloggers and readers supporting Spirit of America, in this and other projects, as they work to help our troops make a difference in Iraq.

Dear Mr President:

’Hello,’ he lied. One of the best book titles I know of.

We former US diplomats applaud our 52 British colleagues who recently sent a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair criticising his Middle East policy and calling on Britain to exert more influence over the United States.

Well, we like the influence Blair has had so far, and their troops have done a pretty good job in Iraq, so I’d say I like the influence that Britain has had on the U.S. But I think they want to change Britain’s policies as well.

As retired foreign service officers we care deeply about our nation’s foreign policy and US credibility in the world.

I believe that. I also believe that they are deeply invested in a process that it fundamentally broken, much as the retired buggywhip makers were distraught at the changes that internal combustion brought. I’ll skip over the little detail (made often by others) about their British colleagues being on the Arab dole, and I won’t dig into Googling all the names and seeing how deeply this group’s hands are shoved into Arab pockets.

We also are deeply concerned by your April 14 endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral plan to reject the rights of three million Palestinians, to deny the right of refugees to return to their homeland, and to retain five large illegal settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank.

So giving back Gaza is a bad thing? And the telling note about ‘the right of refugees to return…’ well, that’s pretty much a nonstarter and has always been. The right of return means the end of Israel; it’s that simple.

I oppose the settlements (and for a good article on the current issues, go see this in Ha’aretz)

This plan defies UN Security Council resolutions calling for Israel’s return of occupied territories.

No!! And it also defies a billion referenda at world conferences on racism, in which nations that won’t – as an example – let me travel in certain cities, because I’m a nonbeliever – get to criticize the U.S. and Israel for our horrible history on race.

It ignores international laws declaring Israeli settlements illegal.

Another argument against the ICC and international law.

It flouts UN Resolution 194, passed in 1948, which affirms the right of refugees to return to their homes or receive compensation for the loss of their property and assistance in resettling in a host country should they choose to do so.

Didn’t they just say that?

And it undermines the Road Map for peace drawn up by the Quartet, including the US. Finally, it reverses longstanding American policy in the Middle East.

Which was working so well, by the way, all through 2001 and 2002.

Your meeting with Sharon followed a series of intensive negotiating sessions between Israelis and Americans, but which left out Palestinians.

Well, most of the Palestinians with any power were hiding from Israeli helicopters, which made them difficult to negotiate with. Reasonable Palestinians, who want to actually see peace, have mostly been cowed into silence by the homicidal thugs running the West Bank and Gaza these days.

In fact, you and Prime Minister Sharon consistently have excluded Palestinians from peace negotiations.

See note above.

Former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo voiced the overwhelming reaction of people around the world when he said: “I believe President Bush declared the death of the peace process today”.

Well, if what we’ve had in the last three years is the fruits of the peace process these diplomats support, I’m all for cheering it’s demise. Long live the new peace process.

By closing the door to negotiations with Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state, you have proved that the United States is not an even-handed peace partner.

Actually, here’s the hidden point: by withdrawing from Gaza and more of the West Bank, Israel is actually bringing the possibility of a Palestinian State closer. I wonder why these guys think this is a bad thing?

You have placed US diplomats, civilians and military doing their jobs overseas in an untenable and even dangerous position.

That’s what they are paid for.

Your unqualified support of Sharon’s extra-judicial assassinations, Israel’s Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in occupied territories, and now your endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral plan are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends.

So on one hand, the wall –designed to limit suicide bombings, and the need to take steps against those who make them happen – is condemned. On the other, the actions taken because of the absence of the wall are condemned. So basically, the Israelis just sit around the pizzerias and schools and wait to get blown up?

It is not too late to reassert American principles of justice and fairness in our relations with all the peoples of the Middle East.

Actually, I think Bush did that, in concert with a certain level of American realism.

Support negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, with the United States serving as a truly honest broker.

I’ve discussed the value of such negotiations below.

A return to the time-honored American tradition of fairness will reverse the present tide of ill will in Europe and the Middle East – even in Iraq.

Yes, the time-honored tradition of fairness, which has worked so damn well. Why not keep doing the same thing over and over, as conditions for the Palestinian people deteriorate, as the Palestinian elites enrich themselves, and Israeli and Palestinian women and children die. It’s been good to them; they get to ride around in armored Suburbans, stay in ritzy hotels, drink good wine, and hardly ever get blown up. Hasn’t worked so well for the folks on the ground, though.

Because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the core of the problems in the Middle East, the entire region – and the world – will rejoice along with Israelis and Palestinians when the killing stops and peace is attained.

Well, I’d always thought that brutal, kleptocratic governments oppressing their people so that they could send as much of their oil wealth to Switzerland as possible was the core of the problems in the Middle East. But what do I know? I’m not an expert.

How offensive and stupid is this letter?

They didn’t even feel it necessary to make the sidebar, pro-forma condemnation of Palestinian terror.

I’m glad these clowns are retired. I wish I’d been in a position to offer them a far earlier exit from service; the world would be a better place if only that had happened.

Commenter Thorley Winston waxes wroth below at my criticism of the new consumer bankruptcy bill:

What rubbish. There is nothing “anti-consumer” about requiring that people who voluntarily decide to enter into a contract should have to uphold their end of the bargain.

Without going into deep detail on this bill (I’ll suggest a reasonably neutral link), let me respond to Thorley and actually get to spend some time kicking at the well-polished loafers of the corporate shills who have pushed this legislation.

I’m always amused when, as a Democrat, conservative Republicans bust me for believing in Big Government Intervention – usually, on behalf of the poor, the less powerful, and people who have been typically excluded from ‘the game’ we play in our economy and polity.

I’m amused because they are the same ones who trip over the tassels on their loafers rushing to the Capitol to get laws changed that might materially improve their lot in life.Let’s look at bankruptcy as an example, and without deeply analyzing the bill, suggest that as far as consumers are concerned, this substantially shifts the burden in bankruptcy to them and from creditors (who stood to lose).

Now portfolio management is simple; I underwrite the risks in my portfolio and set a return necessary to cover the risk. The pattern on increasing consumer willingness to use bankruptcy as a tool for financial management – much like Worldcom, K-Mart, Johns-Mansville, and other corporate borrowers, who follow the pattern set out in ‘Strategic Bankruptcy‘.

But to me, the issue really isn’t a ‘goose’ and ‘gander’ one; the issue is simple.

When the companies that are in the business of loaning money to consumers don’t like the returns or risk they are taking to get those returns, their response isn’t to improve underwriting, better manage their loan portfolios, offer better credit education to their customers – it’s to use their financial and political clout to change the rules under which those loans were made.

Because the laws in place were are much a part of the structure of those loans as the actual agreements executed by the people ol’ Thorley is so contemptuous of.

And that, my friends, is why I can’t get at all distraught about the fact that government regulation imposes burdens (in general – obviously there are lame and counterproductive regulations) on business. Live by the fine print, die by the fine print, I always say.