I don't want to build character. I want it pre-fabricated.



Unless other wise noted, all content
Copyright © 2002 Roy M. Jacobsen

 
Ah, St. Patrick's Day! Cheap green beer in the bars, and talentless radio hacks doing bad Irish accents in the commercials touting "the saving fo the green" at the local StuffMart. Give me a break. Julia Vitullo-Martin gets it right over at the Opinion Journal. Of St. Patrick, she writes:
His Ireland was still dangerous, one of the few areas of Europe never civilized by Rome. Despite living in "daily expectation of murder, treachery, or captivity," Patrick established Ireland as the center of Christian civilization whose monasteries would later save the great manuscripts of the West during the Dark Ages.

This is the man honored every March 17 on the anniversary of his death (ca 461) by American youths vomiting on the streets of New York, Boston, Chicago and other major cities. How did we get here?
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 8:43 AM

 
Geocities has announced that it's discontinuing FTP support for freebie sites, so I'm moving. From now on, you can find my blog at Dispatches from Outland. I'll maintain this site as is for a while.
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 6:49 PM

 
I've often said that the complaints about American Indian team names and mascots were overblown. I'm of Scandinavian descent, and I have no problem with the Vikings. (Well, not with the team name, at any rate. Maybe now that Denny is out of the picture...) I don't know of any Irish people who are in a tizzy about Notre Dame's team name. Well, someone is trying to let me know what it feels like to be a mascot, with the team name "Fighting Whities". And how does it feel? Cool! Don't mess with the "Fighting Whities"!
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 3:39 PM

 
I'm full of quotes today. Teddy Roosevelt said

Do not get into a fight if you can possibly avoid it. If you get in, see it through. Don't hit if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting, but never hit soft. Don't hit at all if you can help it; don't hit a man if you can possibly avoid it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep.

Andrew Jackson felt the same. Steven C. Den Beste comments on this over at USS Clueless.
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 9:22 AM

 
"All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name." -- Kung-fu Tze

When President Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea an "axis of evil", he showed that he understands the importance of calling things by the right name. I'm beginning to wonder if former President Jimmy Carter understands. Memo to Mr. Carter: Evil Exists
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 9:18 AM

 
One of the latest scares to make the rounds (I guess scares are kind of like the various strains of influenza, or whatever other creeping skrunge people pass around this time of year) is the reported nuclear threat to New York City. (Here's a summary from MSNBC, in case you missed it.)

James Lileks says he wouldn't be surprised if it did happen, and that you can bet that, if it does,

There are European columnists in respectable newspapers who would write about the event, and no matter how much sympathy they evinced towards the start, you’d be waiting for the fulcrum of the BUT, and you’d find it. There are reasonable, rational people writing for newspapers grounded in the Western empirical tradition who would feel it was their duty to explain the nuking of New York, and place it in context. They remember Hiroshima, but not Pearl Harbor. (It would be a hallmark of their intellect that New York could suffer both - a sneak attack and a nuke - and they would remain America’s fault.) They would bring up the camp at Gitmo; they would recycle all the false numbers about Iraqi sanction deaths and Afghan casualties, and if they shed a tear it would be for the Motherwells in the museums and the immigrants who, being new to the poisonous shores of America and being guilty of nothing but misguided hope, were blameless.

I have to think that, if it were to happen that someone were to manage to set of a nuke -- even a simple "dirty" bomb (a conventional bomb with a radioactive dust payload) -- anywhere on US soil, that event would ignite something deep inside the American people. The reaction to 9/11 was surprising to many, but it shouldn't have been. We are still, in all the ways that matter, the same people who were galvanized into fierce, determined action following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the attacks of September 11 achieved much the same.

A nuclear attack on one of our major cities would bring our country to a rage; whether it would be hot or cold, I'm not sure. I'm not sure we would answer nukes with nukes; in fact, I doubt it. I have a feeling we would be very calculating, very deliberate. But I have no doubt that we would pull out all the stops in terms of conventional warfare. The action taking place right now in the Pactia province of Afganistan is just a taste of this. The phrase that comes to mind is "No quarter given."
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 9:30 AM

 
Here's an op-ed piece from someone who's been to North Korea, and he doesn't call it "evil." He says it's "hell and madness."

OK so this first appeared last April. It's still worth a look.
posted by Roy M. Jacobsen at 3:09 PM