Part 2 is up over at Winds of Change…education and Iraq…

Check out our new digs at www.windsofchange.net. We have some painting to do, and maybe some drapes and carpet, but the structure looks pretty sound.
I’ve opened with Part I of the response the Dems should have made to Bush’s State of the Union speech.

(From Doonsebury)

…and the problem with this would be?
Here’s the deal; we’re in a changing world right now, and the changes are going to hit the ‘creative’ businesses pretty hard. Jimmy’s right that the world supported by mega-acts in turn supported by mega record sales…requiring mega-distribution, mega-promotion, and mega-corporate structures to support ‘the star-making machinery behind the popular song’ is probably going to get a lot smaller. It is already.
Is that a bad thing, though? The market for estates on the Costa Smerelda in Sardinia may get a little smaller; but a new door opens as an old one closes.
I’ll argue that it ought to be more possible to make a ‘middle-class’ living as a musician or writer.
In the case of music, bands, playing small venues, supported by regional fan bases and direct sales of their music, ought to be able to generate middle-class incomes for their members. You can have kids. If your SO works, you could buy a house.
I’m under no illusion that it wouldn’t be damn hard work to get there and every day once you were there. But most jobs are hard work, and the idea that an independent artist could monetize what they do on an ongoing basis…
…rather than playing Music Industry Lotto and working for nothing for years in the hopes of hitting it huge…
…strikes me as a damn good thing. I say this as a consumer of music who long ago gave up going to stadium shows in favor of clubs.
I think the same model applies in books, video, and potentially games. the current channels won’t go away. The Britney Spears’ of the world we will always have with us, sadly. But new alternatives will open up; we’re on the verge of an explosion of new models, content, and possibilities.
Most of them will vanish, but some may just survive.
I should make a disclosure, and comment that I have a substantial personal investment in a startup aimed at making just this happen. So you could say I’m shilling for my interests.
Or that I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

It’s been seven days since Orange County Democrat Ann Salisbury has posted…
…coincidence, or Republican suppression of dissent??
Republicans suppress dissent. Orange County is Republican. Ann lives in Orange County. Do I have to spell things out??
We will be dispatching inspectors, and may invade Orange County if we don’t like what we hear…

Over at Winds of Change, I’ve got some thoughts on the war.

Read all about it over at Winds of Change.NET

From the L.A. Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/‘laexaminer’):

Family tensions and serious illness may have led the 56-year-old operator of the Zankou Chicken chain to fatally shoot his mother and sister in an upscale Glendale home before turning the gun on himself, police, family and friends said Wednesday.

What a tragedy; sadly a mundane one these days, in which a person, despondent or enraged, kills those close to them and then kills themselves (please spare me please the emails that he did it with a gun…it’s been a knife, fire, a tall building and poison in other cases that made the paper recently). But it hit me hard because like a lot of other Angelinos, Zankou Chicken means a lot to me.
In 1981, my Parisian-born then-wife and I moved back to Los Angeles from Chicago. I’d grown up here, hated it and fled the place at 16. She’d occasionally visited it with me and saw it, as only a well-bred Parisian can, as the emptiest most soulless place on earth.
Then one night, sometime in the next year, we went downtown to the then-thriving LA Theatre Center and saw their amazing production of ‘Jacques and His Master’, stopped at Zankou Chicken afterwards, and then went to Club 88 on Pico and saw X and Los Lobos in a room slightly larger than our living room at home.
Driving home at about 3, we looked at each other, laughed, and decided that living in L.A. might not be so bad after all. My sweetie and I met my brother in the Glendale store just a month ago, and it was as ambrosial as ever. So thank you, Iskenderian family, and please accept my very personal condolences.

Pat Summerall emails me:

Kevin Drum rounds up the evidence against libertarian “scholar” John Lott, a guy widely relied upon on by pundits on the right for evidence that gun control actually produces more crime. Seems Lott may have fabricated a survey he once did on defensive gun use. Is there more? Stay tuned. A more definitive takedown of Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime can be found here.
We just noticed that InstaPundit has been taking issue with Brent Kendall’s new Washington Monthly article, “License to Kill: How the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad get a sniper rifle.” First he decided the article was terrible, sight unseen, because the headline referred to Muhammed’s gun as a sniper rifle when it was actually an assault rifle. (Never blame a journalist for his headline — we don’t pick ’em.) Then he wrote that, according to Kendall “the gun and bullets are apparently responsible for the deaths, not Muhammad and Malvo, who in this report merely occupied a Chevrolet Caprice — an offense against automotive taste, perhaps, but no more.” Surely the professor can do better than that. Blame the person, not the gun, is a favored libertarian argument against gun control, but it’s silly. Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree simply would not have been possible had they not been able to illegally acquire a high-powered rifle. You can’t kill from two hundred yards with a hunting knife. You can’t strangle somebody from the trunk of a car.

Sigh.
I haven’t written much about l’affaire Bellesiles, for a variety of reasons, including some personal ones (hell, may as well acknowledge it…we have a Christmas card from his dad on the mantel). I’ve actually had some correspondence from Lott, although I’ve just scanned his work and the work that has grown up in opposition and support of his work.
But I’ll divert for a moment into the meta-politics here for a moment. Pat isn’t interested in having a dialog about gun control. There are some ‘tells’ that give it away pretty quickly…“scholar” John Lott…takedown of his work…it’s WWE time, folks.
And I’m not interested in being a luchador.
There are real issues around the murder rate in the United States. But since I don’t live in Peter Pan’s world where wishing and clapping my hands makes it so, the guns out there in the world will not simply disappear. Neither, I remind my shooting friends, will the regulation of the personal ownership and possession of guns. For the foreseeable future include figuring out how to live as safely as possible in a society where there are a whole lot of guns, and figure out how to do so while maintaining some semblance of individual rights.
The U.K. continues it’s crackdown, and to what effect? They police are so buried in crime they can’t even investigate property crimes any more.
And to Pat’s (and the original author’s) position on the D.C. shooters, I’ll suggest a few words in response:
Ted Bundy
John Wayne Gacy
Julio Gonzalez

So about this whole blogging thing.
I’m obviously addicted (as many of you have doubtless noticed, it’s this decade’s version of crack). It seems that a lot of bloggers go through the initial rush phase, then realize that it’s incredibly time- and energy- consuming, and that it somehow doesn’t allow them to quit their day jobs, so a lot of things suffer, and they come to a crisis.
In my case, it’s mostly sleep and my home life. I have a sleep deficit that would kill a bear; a list of household chores that’s growing geometrically, and a significant other who is thumbing the pages of Lysistrata while casting meaningful looks my way.
Plus, to be honest, I don’t feel like I’m doing as good a job blogging as I’d like to. I’m not thinking things through, or taking the time to do a little more research. I’ve been working on a piece on bureaucracy and another on democracy and neither is moving along too well.
I’d like to do fewer, better posts, interspersed with a bit of day-to-day fluff. But in reality, I’m not a significant enough figure to hold even the small audience I’ve got doing that, which means I’d lose the interactions via email and comments that mean a lot to me.
So here’s what I’d like to try.
Joe Katzman is moving his blog (currently Winds of Change, although I’m lobbying for a new name) to a group blog format, and has been kind enough to invite me to be the token liberal. I have a ton of respect for him, and am deeply honored that he’d ask me.
He and I see many things in much the same way: We are both concerned about finding a path through the Islamist hatred of the West; and we see technological changes as both presenting serious threats to us and opening new doors to promising futures.
He and some of the other contributors are more warlike than I am, a lot more conservative, and he’s a religious Jew and I’m neither. It may well be that the ‘inner liberal’ who has been hidden under my frustrated criticism of contemporary Democratic liberalism will be forced to come out, which I think would be kind of a good thing. Or I’ll get pulled to the Dark Side of conservatism, in which case, I trust that Ann and Kevin will undertake a quest and mount an expedition to come rescue me.
But I’d like to give it a try. I’ll do my first post for the new site sometime late next week, and will keep this site alive as an archive, possibly as a place to do one or two lightweight things, and as a place to come home to should I choose to do that.
I’m interested in people’s reactions; what do you think of this? To quote self-proclaimed non-pedophile Pete Townsend, I really want to know…

I haven’t published much of anything about Iraq, although I’ve written a bunch about it. Most of what I’ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is doubtless interesting, simply standing up and saying “I’m confused” seemed like a waste of my time and yours.
But I saw something the other day over at Oliver Willis’ place that made me sit up and think.
It was an article in Newsday, suggesting that members of the Administration have floated a plan to take and sell Iraqi oil to pay the costs of the invasion. ‘Spoils of war” they call it.
Now I don’t doubt that someone has floated this as a concept, but I’m also a little dubious about whether it has been adopted as U.S. policy. I Googled it, and find the same story – literally, the same story, by Knute Royce, republished in three places – Newsday, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Gulf News in the UAE. Googling Knute Royce I see that he’s apparently a two-time Pulitzer winner and the Washington D.C. correspondent for Newdsay, so he’s a credible guy. My jury’s out on this one.
But thinking about this brought some small clarity to my thoughts, and I realized just what we’re doing wrong.
There are (at least) two issues at stake in our approach to the Middle East.
The first is that we (the industrial West) have profited quite substantially from Middle Eastern oil; our trading partners there have profited as well, but the profits haven’t built economies and societies that offer much to the average person.
The second issue is that in no small part in response to the dysfunctional societies that have been built and maintained with our oil money, a culture has emerged which is virulently anti-Western; it combines the anti-Western Romantic intellectual strains that flowered in the 60’s and became intellectual commonplaces in the 90’s with traditions in Muslim history of conflict with the West.
The second issue, funded by the profits of the first issue, has emerged as a chronic, low-level war that has most dramatically shown itself on 9/11, but has cost thousands of lives over the last decade in less-dramatic attacks.
The second issue is a genuine threat to us, to our allies in the West, and to the people who are forced to live in religious dictatorships in Islamist countries (note that not all Islamic countries are religious dictatorships or post aggressive threats to the West).
The problem is in no small part of our (again, the West’s) making; we traded freedom for stability in the region in order to have secure and compliant trading partners. But having had a role in raising a psychopath doesn’t mean we should let ourselves be attacked by him as a way of assuaging our guilt.
We have a clear choice; we can fight to secure a supply of affordable oil, and to intimidate the other countries in the region into maintaining our supply of cheap oil; or we can fight to dismantle the social structures that our oil money and their dictators have created and attempt to free the people who have been forced to live hopeless, squalid lives.
There’s a bunch of issues collapsed into that paragraph that will require discussion and explanation…at a later time.
Right now, I want to focus on one thing; that if we’re going to do this, we need to do it for the right reasons, or at least for reasons that aren’t transparently wrong.
If we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:
1) We aren’t in it for the oil. Not in the short run, anyway. A prosperous, stable Middle East would doubtless want to sell and exploit their natural resources. We’d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made.
2) We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.
There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward isn’t.
We need to make a grand moral gesture to make it clear to the world that 1) isn’t the case. Personally, I think that it needs to come both from the American people and businesses, from our government.
I think the whole anti-SUV thing isn’t a bad place to start. It’s an incredibly powerful symbol to the rest of the world that we’re killing people in Iraq so we can buy Suburbans. I don’t believe it should be legislated, I don’t believe they should be banned, but I think that we should each examine what we’re willing to give up to play our part in changing the world so that 9/11 is an aberration.
I do think that on a national level, we should talk about moving toward taxing energy to encourage efficiency; there are a lot of arguments about this, but I’ll make a simple one: we can buy energy from outside our economy, or we can buy ingenuity and products that save it from within it. Which one leads to jobs?
I’m not one of the liberals who has a vision of essentially 19th Century village life as the way we all should live. That goal is of people who have an essentially abstemious belief set. I don’t believe that sacrifice and frugality are in themselves character-building or good moral values. I do believe that sacrifice in the name of a goal is a good thing, and that frugality in the name of building a better future are.
So if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:
1) We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
2) We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipleline, we won’t sell them to Japan)
3) We’re in this for the duration.
If we can’t answer all three as a solid “yes”, we shouldn’t go. If we can, we should.