ABC has this Reuters story: Poll Says Arafat Expected to Win January Election
The Palestinian-run Jerusalem Media and Communication Center survey said 60.6 percent of 1,199 Palestinians polled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip expect Arafat to be re-elected. That compares with 47.5 percent in June.
The story doesn't mention any opposition candidates. Does that mean that only 60% of Palestinians expect Arafat to be re-elected in the absence of any alternative? What do the other 40% expect? That he'll be dead?
I haven't figured out where I stand on the future war with Iraq.
But it seems clear that the anti-war crowd lost a lot of traction in their past opposition to the ridiculously easy subjugation of Afghanistan. They said Afghanistan would be another Vietnam; it would be a quagmire -- just look at the experience of the Red Army; our allies were degenerates on horseback, riding against tanks. Then the whole thing was over in a matter of weeks.
Turns out that it's a lot easer to liberate a country from an unpopular religious mafia than it is to try to impose an unpopular communist dictator.
Now that the ground war phase is over in Afghanistan, those who oppose the war in Iraq claim we should spend more time on Afghanistan:
They could have been more outspoken about the war in Afghanistan, insisting that the Administration put resources behind police work, humanitarian aid and nation-building.
Seems to me that this comment (part of a larger argument against war in Iraq) misses the point. People were quite outspoken about the war in Afghanistan. But they didn't offer constructive commentary about resource allocation. It's a shame, in retrospect. It might have been better taken than the left-wing dittoheaded "quagmire" chorus we got at the time.
The U.S. is done with Afghanistan, at least in an instrumental sense. The Taliban no longer poses a threat -- done! Since we're somewhat enlightened, and to reward our allies, we're helping out around the house as are some of our European allies. (Or not.) But the aid is incidental. It provides further incentive not to harbor terrorist groups in the future. The U.S. war aims for Afghanistan are done, and there's no more mileage to be gotten talking about it.
I want to keep a record of this James Lileks quote, so I'm dumping it in here.
Bush often seems distracted, as if he has just realized there is a weasel in his pants and he'd best finish up and get out of here so he can tend to this here weasel. And when he gets wound up he's often like a man with a wheelbarrow full of rocks going down a hill, trying to keep his balance and his cargo intact. I don't care. He's good with a prepared speech, because he has a secret weapon: he means it.
I have a minor quibble with Steven den Beste's otherwise inspiring rant about ethnic studies programs. Steven argues, effectively, that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and that ethnic studies programs are in fact an industrial-strength way to waste minds.
However, he has this to say about the organization of departments and schools in USC:
It appears that the "college of letters, arts and sciences" is a garbage can where they dumped everything that didn't fit into one of their 17 "professional schools"
I disagree with this characterization of a common non-professional college as a "dumping ground." I had the displeasure of doing some graduate work at UC Berkeley, and their organization of schools and colleges is even more baroque and annoying than USC's.
For example, the College of Chemistry contains the departments of chemistry and chemical engineering. Physics and the other sciences are delegated to the College of Letters and Science, which includes all the fuzzy stuff as well. The College of Engineering is where you'll find all the other types of engineering, including Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). So if you're interested in studying materials at Berkeley, it's going on in three different colleges: Chemistry, Letters and Science (as "condensed matter physics") and Engineering (in MSE).
I suspect that this arrangement is a holdover from the time that dinosaurs named Lewis walked the earth. (That's G.N. Lewis as in Lewis structure.) It was probably necessary to give chemistry its own College to keep Lewis happy, and the bureaucracy acquired power and has been too strong to kill ever since then.
In a sense, USC is lucky to still have all of its non-professional programs under one roof; that'll make it easier for them to shift funding from a dying department to a growing one.