It is another thing entirely to alienate and anger all of Islam in order to spite them for the attacks of almost a decade ago. 9/11 is old news. The world has, in general, moved on. There is no such thing as true outrage at the attacks anymore; there is only political posturing and irrational grudge-holding.

This was a chance to show the world what freedom meant. To show that we welcomed the moderate majority of a religion which, despite its share of extremists, is generally peaceful. To show that we could rise above such simple pettiness. To show that we respect our own Constitution.

That chance was botched. There will always be the morons who truly do still hold a grudge. I suspect that they remain a tiny minority; I’m not yet cynical enough about the nation to postulate that they’re widespread. The people who really get my goat in this parade of idiots are the ones who fill themselves with mock outrage in order to score political points. Because of them, this is somehow a big deal. Because of them, we’re driving away the moderate Muslims, and encouraging the extremists.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That should have been all that needed to be said.

A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007.

The video begins with ground forces requesting support from Crazyhorse, the Apache flight. They mention a group of people, one of whom has a weapon.

It’s hard to see, because we’re looking at a low-resolution version of a low-resolution video looking at a distant target, but the guy does appear to be carrying an AK. It looks like the Apache’s found the group that the ground forces were talking about.

After identifying further members of the group, the Apaches requested and received permission to engage. Only after receiving permission did they first fire weapons. Once they had downed all targets, they stopped firing. They did not fire on the wounded. When a van arrived to evacuate the targets, they requested and received permission to engage. Only then did they disable the van.

Wikileaks is consistently referring to these men as ‘civilians.’ They may not have been uniformed military personnel, but they were definitely combatants; they may not have been currently actively engaged in a firefight, but there had been small arms fire from that area since before dawn that day. The mission of both the Apache element and the ground forces was to eliminate any insurgents and/or weapons caches from the area.

After the fact, it was discovered that two of the people killed were in fact Reuters employees, and that in the van were two children injured by the attack. Coverage of the video has focused on this. It’s tragic, but the newspeople were in the company of armed insurgents and appeared to be part of that group. As for the children, they were simply not detectable from the Apache.

It’s worth looking at the official report. (Local Cache) The results findings begin on page 11 of the PDF. The report contains necessary background information, such as the fact that the infantry less than 200 yards away had been receiving small-arms fire all morning.

There are plenty of people out there calling this a war crime, murder, and worse. That is simply not the case. There are people out there who recognize this (1, 2, 3), but they are too few.

War is a terrible thing, but this was not a crime. This was professional pilots reacting appropriately to a hostile situation. I feel sympathy for the noncombatants in the group, but they brought it upon themselves.

I suppose that I could be a little more forgiving: it wouldn’t be a reboot of the series, as was popular this year, if they kept all the good bits. I just wish they’d kept a few.

I don’t want to die on an airplane. I don’t want to die in my home while eating an organic bagel infested with parasites that lay eggs on my liver. I don’t want to die from starvation or bad water or a thousand other things that I pay our government to monitor and regulate.

But I also don’t expect the government to protect from the literally endless possibilities and threats that could occur at any point to end my life or the life of the few I love. It’s been nearly a decade since terrorists used airplanes to attack our country, and last week’s attempt makes it clear that the lack of terrorist attacks have nothing to do with the increasing gauntlet of whirring machines, friskings, and arbitrary bureaucratic provisions, but simply that for the most part, there just aren’t that many terrorists trying to blow up planes. Because god knows if there were, the TSA isn’t capable of stopping them. We’re just one bad burrito away from the TSA forcing passengers to choke back an Imodium and a Xanax before being hogtied to our seats.

I will not succumb to an atmosphere of paranoia in which I am required to keep my hands visible, my lap clear, and in which I am prohibited from movement during any portion of a flight. Instead, I boycott the industry until it stops mistaking liberty for threat. I encourage you to do the same. There exist other options than commercial air: general aviation is a lot of fun, but there also exist long-haul bus and train lines even in the US.

At some point, commercial air travel stops being worth the hassle. For me, that point has just been reached.

Seoul Incheon: not actually very remarkable. It’s a big modern airport very much like many other big modern airports. It’s not ideally designed: it requires walking maybe 1500 meters from one end to the other, for military arrivals at least. Still, its linear design means it is at least simple. Also, free internet and occasional power ports make things nice.

Beijing: ridiculously, monumentally enormous. The extra open architecture is very pretty and enhances the impression of spaciousness. It’s got a modest selection of duty free shops and restaurants. For all its size, it’s strangely empty: the restroom has queueing lines and handy symbols built in to speed traffic through its 20 stalls and 40 urinals, but I had it to myself. Perhaps the decision not to heat it had something to do with that. There are occasional power ports, but they are of the wrong shape and voltage. Internet is available if you pay cash yuan at the business center. There is no easy way to get cash yuan. Important: do not attempt to connect there using military id and orders in lieu of passport; you’ll be turned back by Customs.

Newark Liberty: relentlessly commercial. Like many US airports, there is pretty obviously more security in place than the architecture was designed for. My overriding impression of the airport comes from one flight where I connected there from Japan: my bag took 90 minutes to emerge from the baggage claim, and then the line to re-check it ate another 150. Needless to say, I missed my connection from all of this. It wasn’t nearly so bad this time, at least. Internet and power are available at business kiosks.

Manchester Boston: a small feeder airport with aspirations to eventually grow into a hub. Its current compact size and low traffic makes it feel very comfortable. Power and wireless internet are both easy to find and free.

Tokyo Narita: efficient, artistic, elegant. Probably the most comfortable airport for its size I’ve ever been in. It’s also one of the more complex, but there is plenty of clear signage to help find the way around. Power and wireless internet are ubiquitous, but the “you’ve successfully joined our wireless page” is actually a multilingual set of links to various ways to pay for the connection to get it to stop redirecting all traffic to the links page.

Military:

RKSM (Seoul Airbase): as my home airbase, it’s the place I’m most familiar with. It’s unique in my experience of military airfields in not having a greasy spoon type diner attached to the flight ops building somewhere. The airbase is actually run by the Koreans, with K-16 being a plot leased to the US military.

RKSO (Osan Airbase): this place is run by the Air Force, so I don’t often go there. Still, if you want to see an F-16, an A-10, or a U-2 on the ramp, this is the place to (occasionally) find them.

RKSG (Camp Humphreys): this is where we actually do most training, as it’s the nearest airbase actually run by the US Army. Here’s where the rest of 2CAB, meaning the Apaches, Chinooks, and another battalion of Black Hawks, are based.

RKSY (Yongsan Garrison): a tiny heliport barely large enough to fit two Black Hawks simultaneously, it’s still a common destination because Yongsan is where a lot of the command structure for Korea is located.

RKJK (Kunsan Airbase): another Air Force base, this one only gets mentioned because it has the nicest Flight Ops building and pilot lounge I’ve ever been in. I believe it homes F-16s.

RKTG (Camp Walker): this place apparently used to have a fairly large air contingent; you can still see the remains of a runway suitable for fixed wings, and there’s plenty of parking and refuel space. However, at some point buildings were constructed over both ends of the runway, leaving only a single helicopter pad. It does have an exceptionally nice USO building.

It is. Enter Secure Flight, the latest waste of time from the ever-useless TSA. Conceptually, it’s at least not counterproductive: they want to make the no-fly and extra screening watchlists more selective, by accounting for age and gender as well as name. However, they remain true to form by implementing the idea terribly.

Here’s the idea: every traveler must submit their full name, their date of birth, and their gender when purchasing a ticket. The airline collates a list of these and submits it to the TSA, where it is compared to the watchlists.

Here are the problems. First, no airline ticket purchasing system is designed to collect all of this information. That could be fixed, but the TSA is rolling out the program slowly on a per-airline basis with no advance notice or public oversight, requiring each of them to send these scammy-looking emails after the fact of purchase to collect this information without which the ticket becomes void.

Second, the filtering is done by computer, so it requires the traveler’s exact name. The problem here is that few if any people write their name exactly the same way on every document. I buy airline tickets using my first and last name. Some of my identification documents have my full middle name, some include just an initial. Sometimes, as in my upcoming flight, I won’t have any formal identification documents at all, just military leave paperwork. (Fun fact: I’ve flown to and from Korea three times so far with nothing more than an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper with a form and some scribbled signatures on it. Mine is authentic. The TSA has never actually verified that it was.) Plenty of people have more than three names. Designing the system such that it can be defeated by leaving out an initial renders it nearly useless.

Finally, if you’ve got my name, gender, and birth date, you’re halfway to stealing my identity. I am not comfortable surrendering this information to an organization that has reliably provided security theatre at the expense of actual security. To do much with a stolen identity, you also need at least part of a social security number; I suspect that anyone in a position to misuse the passenger information collected through this program will also have access to resources which can provide that.

Will I submit, and provide the TSA with everything it demands? Yes. Commercial flight is still the only option both fast enough to provide international travel within my leave time and cheap enough to be affordable. However, every time I fly within the US, I am more and more disinclined to ever repeat the experience.

We have dealt with this problem before. The cities of Algiers and Tripoli were havens for the pirates. Let us see how it ended for them:

• 1805: First Barbary War. Tripoli ends piracy vs. US vessels. In Algiers, piracy continues.
• 1812: Second Barbary War. Algiers ends piracy vs. US vessels. Against European powers, piracy continues.
• 1816: The British bombarded Algiers: secured the release of 3000 prisoners and the promise of ending piracy. Piracy continues.
• 1824: The British bombard Algiers again. Piracy continues.
• 1830: The French capture Algiers

The genocidal thoroughness with which the French conquered and colonized Algeria, causing the deaths of up to a third of Algeria’s population, put an effective end to piracy from the Barbary coast.

What lesson can we take from this? How about that pirates can be defeated en masse, so long as there is sufficient political will to just keep killing people until they agree to stop attempting piracy.

“But unrestrained aggression in that region will just drive more people to terrorism, exacerbating our long-term problems with them!”

There are two responses to that. The first is that attacking pirates isn’t aggression; it’s defense. It may be pre-emptive defense, but it’s still just a response to a provocation to protect the safety of our citizens. The second is that piracy is terrorism, on the seas. There are only two real differences: pirates neatly identify themselves, as anyone on a boat that is attacking or reinforcing attackers may be considered a pirate. Also, terrorists generally at least pretend to having a political goal; pirates are in it for the money.

All we need to do is bring down the hammer, such that the pirates have to decide what is more important: our money or their lives.

How do we do this? We just start killing pirates. Destroy any boat that comes to reinforce a pirate crew. Destroy any boat that contains only pirates, even if it contains hostages. We can’t let the fear of one casualty paralyze our ability to respond. If necesary, we can resort to historical precedent and just start shelling the ports from which they emerge. Shelling, historically, is at best a short term solution. Still, there’s no denying the fact that it does work.

I’d be surprised if this is what ends up happening. We’ve defined ourselves as a nation that sheds blood only as a last resort; any politician who remembers G.W. Bush is going to be very cautious about launching any sort of attack not necessary to the prosecution of the wars he started. Even so, it is appropriate to use both the carrot and the stick in national policy.

That if once you have paid him the Danegeld, You never get rid of the Dane.

–Rudyard Kipling

I can’t rule out the possibility that a bailout of some kind is necessary. I am not an economist; I am not up on the macroeconomic knowledge I’d need to have an opinion on the issue worthy of stating. My opposition to the bill had a lot more to do with the sense that politicians were trying to pull a fast one, and the fact that money allocated cannot be unspent, than any rational economic theory that it is better to let the market weather through it on its own.

The problem is that I don’t know any economists personally. I haven’t read any articles by economists for or against the bailout plan. I’ve heard a whole lot from politicians, who can’t be trusted to give an objective reading of the situation, and a lot from news organizations and bloggers commenting on what the politicians have to say.

A declining market hurts my net worth. The fact of the matter is that I’ve got ten times as much money in the stock market as in day-to-day bank accounts, and I’ve got the automatic transactions set up to channel a fraction of every month’s income into the market for retirement. The thing is, I can afford to wait this out. I don’t have much debt right now, and I’ve got no incentive to seek any in the short term. If it takes a decade or two for everything to recover, I’ll be annoyed at the enforced delay in recovering those assets, but it won’t affect my standard of living.

I’d love to see a well-reasoned, lucid explanation by a qualified economist showing how a bailout would help me. If such a thing were produced, I could see myself being persuaded that a bailout is the right course of action for the government. I suspect that this is true of a lot of people.

However, the absense of any such thing implies that it does not exist because qualified economists don’t believe the bailout will help the average American. Alternately, they do believe that it would, but they won’t waste the time writing a position paper on legislation that’s being pushed through an extreme fast track. They’re talking about writing and voting on an alternate bailout plan as soon as this Thursday. Without time to read and think through proposed legislation, how can it help but become a political process?

The problem with processes which are inherently political is that they are bad at predicting the worth of any given piece of proposed legislation. To get a realistic assessment, you need to go to subject matter experts. Nobody else’s opinion is worth much of anything.

In this case, I’m waiting to hear back from the economists.

On the one hand, I am forced to agree with this guy on some points: not all worldviews have equal merit, and some are simply better than others. On the other hand, I believe that one trait which increases a culture’s merit is exactly the xenophilia that this guy decries.

Why is it important to celebrate diversity? Because people have a hard time with subtlety, and so any culture which does not intentionally take joy in difference will inevitably find itself drifting toward prejudice, and toward injustice. If people believe subconsciously that the barbarians elsewhere aren’t really human, they’ll never be able to treat them consciously as equals.

The questionable premise is that traditions, beliefs, and practices in all their ethnic and historical profusion self-authenticate their claims to truth, beauty, and goodness. Not only must all the ‘voices’ be heard, whatever they come up with must be treated with respect … Open-ended diversity is thrust upon us as a positive object of obligatory good feeling.

Here is the problem: accepting, and even taking joy in learning about foreign cultures and lifestyles does not imply that one approves of them or would want to include every feature in one’s own daily life. Look at the atrocities against women that the Taliban committed in Afghanistan: it is important to learn about what went on there, even if only as a cautionary example of the problems associated with a fundamentalist government. Respecting that culture boils down to taking individuals from that culture on their own merits and refraining from intervention*.

It is important to remember that the case of the Taliban approaches the worst case possible. For most other cultures and civilizations, there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Look at Europe to discover the benefits and penalties associated with a more socialistic stance. Look at Japan to see what happens in a liberal democracy when society still places huge pressure on people to value their duty to others above themselves. Look at most places in the world, and one can see both benefits and penalties associated with the choices that society made in contrast with our own. However, one can only objectively look at those cultures if one first accepts that they have an inherent right to exist, and that acceptance can only come if one’s own culture celebrates diversity.

Should an ethnic attachment to astrology be included as a legitimate discipline in college curricula because politicians and bureaucrats in India submit decisions bearing on public issues to readings of the stars? Should tribal shamans be licensed to practice “alternative” medicine? In postmodern jargon, is not one scientific or medical “narrative” as good as another?

There is absolutely no reason why An Introduction to Indian Astrology could not be a perfectly legitimate college course. For a student of Indian culture and folklore, such a course might be essential. Accepting other cultures does not at all imply that we must attempt to import every feature of every culture that we come in contact with; such an approach would obviously be both chaotic and futile. However, it is perfectly feasible to take other cultures seriously on their own merits.

As for alternative medicine, one must first realize what a license to practice medicine is: it is official certification that the doctor in question uses techniques and tools which have been proven, statistically and rigorously, to work. Any “alternative” technique which can offer proof–the double-blind, statistical kind–that it works, is inherently an acceptable tool for a licensed doctor. Alternative medicine is comprised of remedies which cannot offer that proof; as such, there is no reason to license its practitioners. Neither is there any reason to prevent them from setting up alternative clinics, so long as they do not masquerade as a licensed doctor. Either one believes in the practitioner as well as the remedy, or one does not.

An uninformed, unsuspecting student body, awash in diversity rhetoric and pedagogy, maneuvered by solemn, earnest action plans shaped by diversity ideologues, might be led to think that ethnic violence and hatred, alive and readily visible around the world, has nothing to do with ethnicity and its inherent premise of exclusiveness.

The author of the article in question has taken great pains to utterly demolish a straw man. There is no great pressure to accept other cultures in a completely valueless, utterly morally relativistic setting. That would be nearly impossible, if it is possible at all. Every person has some deeply ingrained set of criteria for judging other cultures, in whole or in part. Mine is simple: cultures are ranked in order of their ability to maximize liberty per capita. Other people might value personal safety as more important, or conformity to some religious text. Regardless of which criteria one uses, they can only be applied objectively if one first accepts that other cultures have an intrinsic right to exist. This is the celebration of diversity that needs to be, and generally is, applied in the educational system of our culture.