Ridiculous item of the day
Asthma prevalence now blamed on global warming

Ridiculous item of the dayI heard on the radio this morning an ad that started off with the sounds of someone coughing and hacking. Then the voiceover said it was the sound of global warming. Asthma is increasing, said the ad, and the fault lies with global warming.

Then I was informed global warming is to blame for the decreasing visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains (along the Tennessee-North Carolina border), which have been called "smoky" since the first settlers cross them more than 200 years ago, when presumably the globe wasn't warming.

But wait! There is salvation! Call your senators today to urge them vote for the "McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act."

The bill would cap the 2010 aggregate emissions level for the covered sectors at the 2000 level. The bill's emissions limits would not apply to the agricultural and the residential sectors. Certain subsectors would be exempt if the Administrator determined that it was not feasible to measure their GHG emissions. The Commerce Department would biennially re-evaluate the level of allowances to determine whether it was consistent with the objective of the United Nation’’s Framework Convention on Climate Change of stabilizing GHG emissions at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Clear?

It can't be denied that asthma is rising in prevalence, in children more than adults and in blacks more than whites, according to a US Army study, but blaming "global warming" has all the scientific grounding of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Things in the environment trigger an asthma attack. These "triggers" vary from person to person, but common ones include cold air; exercise; allergens (things that cause allergies, such as dust mites, molds, pollens, animal dander or cockroach debris); and some types of viral infections.

Not one of these things is attributable to global warming, even if we accept that human-caused global warming is a real phenomenon. Furthermore, Canadian health authorities attribute the increase in asthma in large part to more sterile home environments, which cannot even in a drunken stupor be attributed to global warming. "More sterile" really means more tightly sealed because of modern construction techniques. Australian health authorities say that such homes pose an increased threat to asthma sufferers or those prone to asthma because they trap moisture inside the home and that leads to mold infections.

The [Royal Australian Institute of Architects'] chief executive, Robin Ould, says the level of rising damp in a home can in many cases, trigger a potentially fatal attack in some asthma sufferers.
"A lot of people's asthma is triggered by dust mites, by fungus and by the spores or the pollen that comes out of mould," he said.

"So that where you've got an environment that's conducive to the build up of mould and mildew and harbours dust mites and increases the environment, where dust mites can thrive then the potential there is for people with asthma to have their asthma triggered in the home."

He says this can exacerbate an asthma sufferer's condition or it can actually trigger a very severe asthma attack.

The reason homes are built so tight these days is for energy efficiency. Tighter homes bleed less heat into the outside during winter and allow less heat in during summer. Of course, tighter homes use less energy than otherwise. Using less energy combats global warming, does it not?

So with tongue partly in cheek, I might say that the rising prevalence of asthma - which is serious, make no mistake - is due in large part to measures taken by builders and others to do things which fight global warming. So is the fight-global-warming movement actually helping to cause more asthma?

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:43:59 AM.
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Ridiculous item of the day
Asthma prevalence now blamed on global warming

Ridiculous item of the dayI heard on the radio this morning an ad that started off with the sounds of someone coughing and hacking. Then the voiceover said it was the sound of global warming. Asthma is increasing, said the ad, and the fault lies with global warming.

Then I was informed global warming is to blame for the decreasing visibility in the Great Smoky Mountains (along the Tennessee-North Carolina border), which have been called "smoky" since the first settlers cross them more than 200 years ago, when presumably the globe wasn't warming.

But wait! There is salvation! Call your senators today to urge them vote for the "McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act."

The bill would cap the 2010 aggregate emissions level for the covered sectors at the 2000 level. The bill's emissions limits would not apply to the agricultural and the residential sectors. Certain subsectors would be exempt if the Administrator determined that it was not feasible to measure their GHG emissions. The Commerce Department would biennially re-evaluate the level of allowances to determine whether it was consistent with the objective of the United Nation’’s Framework Convention on Climate Change of stabilizing GHG emissions at a level that will prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Clear?

It can't be denied that asthma is rising in prevalence, in children more than adults and in blacks more than whites, according to a US Army study, but blaming "global warming" has all the scientific grounding of "The Day After Tomorrow."

Things in the environment trigger an asthma attack. These "triggers" vary from person to person, but common ones include cold air; exercise; allergens (things that cause allergies, such as dust mites, molds, pollens, animal dander or cockroach debris); and some types of viral infections.

Not one of these things is attributable to global warming, even if we accept that human-caused global warming is a real phenomenon. Furthermore, Canadian health authorities attribute the increase in asthma in large part to more sterile home environments, which cannot even in a drunken stupor be attributed to global warming. "More sterile" really means more tightly sealed because of modern construction techniques. Australian health authorities say that such homes pose an increased threat to asthma sufferers or those prone to asthma because they trap moisture inside the home and that leads to mold infections.

The [Royal Australian Institute of Architects'] chief executive, Robin Ould, says the level of rising damp in a home can in many cases, trigger a potentially fatal attack in some asthma sufferers.
"A lot of people's asthma is triggered by dust mites, by fungus and by the spores or the pollen that comes out of mould," he said.

"So that where you've got an environment that's conducive to the build up of mould and mildew and harbours dust mites and increases the environment, where dust mites can thrive then the potential there is for people with asthma to have their asthma triggered in the home."

He says this can exacerbate an asthma sufferer's condition or it can actually trigger a very severe asthma attack.

The reason homes are built so tight these days is for energy efficiency. Tighter homes bleed less heat into the outside during winter and allow less heat in during summer. Of course, tighter homes use less energy than otherwise. Using less energy combats global warming, does it not?

So with tongue partly in cheek, I might say that the rising prevalence of asthma - which is serious, make no mistake - is due in large part to measures taken by builders and others to do things which fight global warming. So is the fight-global-warming movement actually helping to cause more asthma?

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/9/2004 10:43:41 AM.
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Template tweaking
Changes to the template:

Moved several permanent links to a horizontal line across the masthead where they will be easier to find

The move necessitated changing the background color of the masthead from dark blue to pale yellow because the master style code for the whole blog makes all links navy blue (red when moused over). If there is a way to change the color of links for just the masthead, I couldn't find it.

Added some hard line breaks a few places that you may not notice, but that I did.

Sorry, no PDA-friendly page. Blogger just doesn't offer a way to publish a post to two different pages (this one and a PDA index page) at the same time. I'm still working on a solution, though I don't know what it might be.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 09:39:27 PM.
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Incredible turnout for Reagan repose
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio show said today that he waited in in his car for five hours just to exit off the interstate to drive where Ronald Reagan's flag-draped coffin reposed for public viewing at the Reagan Library. Then he waited another five hours to stand in line to reach the coffin, where, as a retired US Marine, he rendered the hand salute and left.

Total time at the coffin: one minute, after waiting in line for 10 hours.

James Joyner has an excellent roundup of news coverage and links.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:39:04 PM.
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Is hockey finished as a big league sport?
A columnist for Nashville's Tennessean paper says that the end of the Stanley Cup tourney may mark the end of the NHL as a major pro sport.

An NHL lockout is imminent, the sides incredibly far apart on the fundamental issues.

That's just the financial end of it.

The league, led by blindfolded commissioner Gary Bettman, barely acknowledges the problems with the game. Because the high-ranking guys don't like to be on the hook for altering the status quo, and because they fear tinkering with anything that might upset the Canadian hockey fanatic or the Original Six, they can't see it's more than finances that are killing the game:

The low scoring, the lack of personalities, the monstrous influx of players from outside North America, the overly long schedule, the drawn-out playoffs.

And the Stanley Cup was a ho-hummer for most of America. ABC Sports reported that, "the average rating for the five Stanley Cup final games on ABC were the lowest since the network began broadcasting the finals again in 2000."

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 07:00:31 PM.
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Who would have thought?
George Miller, who was "indoctrinated" in the superiority of the communist system while attending the University of Manchester, England, writes about Ronald Reagan and the collapse of communism.

The academics will tell a new generation a pack of lies and distortions, belittling the role of Western values and of democratic leaders and spending hours in seminars on Iran/contra while their students are forced to discover Reagan's Berlin speech on the Internet.

However, we have the evidence, on video, of the President of the American Republic standing in Berlin in 1987, appealing directly to the subjugated people of Eastern Europe to throw off their chains. Who would have thought that the most effective revolutionary visionary and strategist of the late 20th Century would be a conservative president of a democratic republic? Certainly I, indoctrinated to believe that radicalism was the preserve of the Left, did not think it remotely possible - hence the mantra and hence the realization, in his death, that Reagan, already a figure of immense importance to people who love liberty, will be regarded as one of history's great democratic leaders.

Practically alone among Western political leaders, Reagan believed that the Soviet empire would fall if pushed the right way. Fortunately, another key leader, just as tough minded as Reagan, agreed - the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

Stop and ponder sometime how much history of the last 100 years has been shaped by America and Great Britain.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 06:40:44 PM.
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This blog's RSS feed
Bill Hobbs asked in a comment to the next post down whether I had an RSS feed for this blog. I have had RSS for a very long time, but his question made me realize that the link had been buried low on the left column.

So I repositioned it to the upper left, above the Blogads slot. So RSS away!

Update: A commenter pointed out that the feed only had the first part of each post, so I have changed the setting so that all of each post should now come through. I hope this helps!

Also, a reader emailed to suggest I should have a PDA-friendly page like Glenn Reynolds site does (here). I'd love to, but as far as I know, it is not possible to do this using Blogger.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/8/2004 05:57:32 PM.
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Blogads work, this blog is part of the proof!
I am very grateful to Jeff Jarvis for publishing an email he received from Jeff Sharlet, editor of the Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU.

You will notice a blogad for The Revealer in my site's upper-left column.

Jeff wrote Jeff that Blogads "blew conventional media out of the water" when it came to advertising returns:

The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don't know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I'd estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason's Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing's, beat Beliefnet [boldface added - DS].

I am flattered and honored to be cited!

Blogads recently released the results of its own survey about who reads blogs and responds to Blogads featured on them:

This survey shows that blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year.

Moreover, blog readers are more cyber-active than I'd hoped: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

50% have spent more than $50 online on books.
47% have spent more than $500 online for plane tickets.
50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate, and 5% have contributed more than $1000. (Only 25% of NYTimes.com readers have contributed anything online in the last year.)

There's more to their release, of course.

More and more business ple are discovering that advertsing on blogs is smart, and the most effective blog advertising there is is through Blogads.

To advertise of this site, just click here!

BTW, compared to those other guys Mr. Sharlett cited, my blog is smaller. But this blog is still fairly large. One Hand Clapping is ranked 38th for traffic on the TTLB Ecosystem, 52nd in importance in the Blogrunner 100, and 113th in importance out of 143,873 blogs ranked on Blogstreet - all figures as of the time of posting, of course.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:39:23 PM.
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Ronald Reagan
I am probably about the last blogger in America to post about the death of former President Ronald Reagan. The big news day for his death was Sunday, the one day of the week I really try to take off from blogging. It's not a special sensitivity of doing no labor on the Christian Sabbath so much as that Sundays are my busiest day anyway. The first Sunday of the month (yesterday) is also when we celebrate Holy Communion, and on those Sundays I spend the afternoon taking Communion to our shutins and visiting with them.

I never met President Reagan nor as far as I remember did I ever see him in person. The closest brush I had with him was the day that Bob Hope almost made me rich. I remember the day Reagan was shot, but not very vividly. I was a company commander at Fort Jackson, SC, and my first sergeant heard it on the radio, then told me.

I never lionized Reagan. He was a good president overall, but I suspect a serious examination of his legacy will reveal some serious problems with how he executed a number of initiatives. Iran-Contra comes to mind.

Probably Reagan's presidency, the first few years anyway, look good partly because Jimmy Carter's presidency was so crummy. Except for the Camp David Accords, affirming peace between Egypt and Israel, it's hard to recall another noteworthy accomplishment of Carter.

James Fallows, who served on Carter's White House staff, said that Carter was a man of Great Ideas but no Big Ideas.

There was, Fallows observed, no real organizing principle to Carter's administration, just one Great Idea after another, unconnected with one another.

Reagan, OTOH, was not a man of Great Ideas. He was a man of Big Ideas, of which there were precisely three: decrease taxes, "get government off the backs of the people," and build up the military. That was Reagan's 1980 campaign platform in a nutshell, and Reagan ruthlessly stomped on campaigners or, later, his administration's officials, who tried to divert him or his administration from doing those three things.

Fallows wrote that under Carter, the administration's leaders many days literally did not know what they were supposed to be doing in their office to move the administration's goals forward. The reason was that there were so many goals, and they changed all the time.

Under Reagan, however, every department head, every administrator arose every morning and knew s/he was supposed to do one or more of three things, and s/he'd better get to it.

I think this focus became somewhat blurred in the second term, which was flawed in comparison with the first.

As an Army officer throughout Reagan's eight years, I saw firsthand the benefits of the Reagan buildup of the nation's military. There was a bit of Hollywood to some of it - the "600-ship Navy" for example. Why 600? Why not 575 or 611? Because "600-ship Navy" rolled trippingly off the tongue. It was sound bite driven.

I wrote 13 months ago that even though an Iraqi general attributed his country's defeat to American "technology beyond belief,"

There are other advantages the US military brings to the fray that are not shared by any other military force in the world, not even Great Britain's or Israel's, impressive as their forces are. They are, in no particular order:

Funding and equipping,

Training and training facilities

A horizontal organization

The first two of these items had their genesis in the Reagan administration.

The real funding advantage of American forces is found less in numbers comparisons than it is in funding endurance. The post-Vietnam austerity ended in the last year of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Under the Reagan administration, funding climbed dramatically and has stayed there since. There were decreases during the Clinton years, yes, but not anything like the services had to endure after WW 1, WW 2, Korea and Vietnam. ...

However, the main advantage that America’s military has in funding is that the defense budget has been pretty well provided for by five successive administrations (a late start under Carter, yes, but a start nonetheless). By American historical standards, this is exceptional.

A reasonable assurance that the military would not go through cycles of starvation and feasting enabled the generals and admirals to focus on training and training technology in way they never could before.

It is also worth remembering that throughout his tenure, Reagan had to contend with a Congress in which both houses were controlled by the other party. I heard a radio commentator say today that despite overall lower tax brackets, federal tax revenue doubled during his term. Yet the federal budget deficit was three times greater when he left office than when he began. Ultimately, of course, this state of affairs can be laid only on the shoulder of the Congress, especially the House, which originates all money legislation. The commentator said that for every dollar of new revenue the government brought in during Reagan's term, the Congress spent $1.83.

It would be an interesting thing to compare the budgets Reagan submitted to the Congress with both the revenues coming in for the same fiscal year and the budgets the Congress finally passed (and Reagan signed).

Reagan started off as a Roosevelt Democrat, about the time he hit Hollywood for his movie career. Yet by the late 1950s, at the latest, he had formed an anti-New Deal political philosophy. If the belief that both government and taxes should be as small as possible define American political conservatism, then Reagan was last conservative of either party we have seen. Certainly the present president is no conservative in the Reagan sense; if anything, G. W. Bush is a Roosevelt Republican, which I don't think is a good combination. Heaven knows that W. doesn't talk about smaller government or "getting government off the backs of the people," as Reagan did (even though, I believe, the federal government actually grew larger from 1981-1989).

I will not dwell on the fact that Reagan was the only president who believed that the Soviet Union could fall and would fall if American policies were stout enough to make it happen. His alliance with Pope John Paul II to shore up the Solidarity movement in Poland (the Pope's native country) was brilliant. A politically liberalized Poland reverberated throughout the entire East Bloc.

Regarding the USSR itself, Reagan was singularly fortunate to have a Mikhail Gorbachev named as his counterpart leader of the communist empire. Gorbachev entered office as the general secretary of the CPSU after heading the ministry of agriculture - not the usual route for a gensec. But Gorby's experience there revealed to him just how hollow and weak the Soviet economy was.

Gorby knew that the USSR could not continue with business as usual. There were several features of Reagan's security policies that both compelled and enabled Gorbachev to steer the USSR into a new direction that finally led to the end of the Soviet empire (which Gorby, of course, never intended):

the prospect that the US would develop and deploy a Ballistic Missile Defense (aka, "Star Wars"),

the strengthening of America's conventional military across the board,

the deployment of American Pershing II missiles in Europe - they could range Moscow and negated the Soviets' deployment of SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe,

the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe, a weapon for which the Soviets had no real counterpart and no defense.

The Soviet leadership finally had to face facts: the USSR was too broke to keep up and lacked the technical skills and industrial base to do so anyway. The rest, as they say, is history.

Reagan's arms buildup also unhinged the Kremlin. His clarion call for a missile-based defense system against nuclear weapons in 1983 helped convince the Politburo to select Mikhail Gorbachev as a less hard-line Soviet leader in 1985. "Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail," says Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's top spokesman during the 1980s. "The Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition." Mr. Gorbachev himself agrees the U.S. exhausted his country economically and acknowledges Reagan's place in history. "Who knows what would have happened if he wasn't there?" he told the History Channel in 2002.

Need I point out that the American military today is itself a legacy of Ronald Reagan? The precision weapons, communications and control systems and extremely high levels of training found among the military almost all had their genesis during his administration. If you try to imagine what the military would have looked like had it stayed the post-Vietnam course it was on in 1981, then you will discern that our options after Sept. 11, 2001 would have been extremely limited.

For all the ink now about Reagan's enduring legacy, it seems to me that only three have outlived him. The first is the power and flexibility of the military I just described. The second is the termination of Soviet communism and with it the liberation of hundreds of millions of people under the Soviet yoke. And that without a shot being fired against them. That alone gives him a honored place in history and in my view completely outweighs everything on the negative side of his presidency's ledger.

The third is his tax policy. Since his term it has been very difficult for presidential candidates to talk successfully about raising personal income taxes (notice Kerry has shut up about it in recent weeks). Even though almost all "tax reform" schemes since his term really just shift the tax burden around rather than truly lower taxes, any candidate knows that across-the-board increases are DOA. The WSJ wrote today,

When Mr. Reagan took office, the top marginal U.S. tax rate was 70%. When he left the top rate was 28%; it is now 35%, and even John Kerry has conceded with his proposal to cut some corporate taxes that the marginal rate of tax matters. Today Americans may disagree about what tax cuts are needed, how deep they should go, and what they ought to target. But the debate itself reflects Mr. Reagan's central premise: that people respond to incentives, and that high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive.

This Reagan tenet alone has had a lasting effect on American political discourse and will for many years to come, I am sure.

Absent these three achievements, Reagan would rank as merely mediocre. But they are huge. They propel him into the first rank of occupants of the Oval Office.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 09:32:16 PM.
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Monastery blogging
David Whidden has a blog devoted to his stay in a monastery. Today's post:

Today I’d like to spell out what I see as the problems that exist in our churches now. First, religious commitment tends to be viewed as something that is for the benefit of the individual. ...

Second, this individualistic bent seems to have lent itself to the idea that someone can be “spiritual, but not religious.” ...

Third, the cultural individualism in which we swim creates serious issues with authority.

So take a look if you are so inclined.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:57:28 PM.
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Saudis: You're either with us or with the terrorists
The Saudi government says,

... anybody who fails to report Al Qaida activities will be prosecuted as terrorist accomplices. At the same time, authorities have offered major awards for information that would lead to the capture of Islamic insurgents

The kingdom's clerics have also been ordered to condemn al Qaeda in their sermons.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/7/2004 05:42:06 PM.
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Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
A guest post by my son, Thomas Sensing, who earlier appeared here as Martin Luther

I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter series, having read all the books multiple times and seen all three movies - the most recent of which I saw on its opening day. Coming from my viewpoint of having read the books, I have both the blessing and the curse that comes with knowing what is going to happen and, more importantly, how it happens. This is something that non-readers (such as my father) lack.

From the viewpoint of one who has read (and loved) the Azkaban book, my first impression and impulse at the beginning of the end credits of Azkaban was "Oh no!" I was thoroughly let down by the fact that it didn’t put in many things, or under-did others. There were certain scenes where I thought that director Alfonso Cuaron needed to take more time to explain the situation so non-readers could understand better - e.g. (and not to give anything away) the scene in Madam Rosmerta’s pub and the scene in the Shrieking Shack. These scenes were paced too fast. Cuaron said that he wanted to do away with the redundancies of the previous two movies and squarely focus on Harry’s journey to find himself. From the opinion of an avid reader, Cuaron should have humored us readers and use another twenty minutes to put in more detail, which also would have helped those who hadn’t read the book.

Some scenes I knew to be true to the book and also very well done, such as the time-travel sequence. When I first read this scene in the book, I was blown away by its magnificence and coordination. The movie made no sacrifices to length of time for this scene and stayed true to the book - and that might be why I loved it so much.

Most prevalent in my mind throughout the movie was the sharp turn of spirit from the first two movies and the first three books themselves. The third book is read more like a mystery, rather than an inner journey of identity, as posed by the movie. The movie definitely strays from the generally happy nature of the book.

Now for a change of point of view. From the viewpoint of a normal moviegoer, Azkaban was brilliant. It was a thoroughly enjoyable movie that had some very funny moments and never a boring one (thanks largely to the fast pace). The acting sure was better than the first two. The scenes transitioned well, and the special effects were very good; I thought that the Dementors were especially well-done. And best of all, you leave the movie on a happy note.

I guess that my expectations were too high going in, so they were let lower going out. This didn’t stop me from completely immersing myself in the movie and having a grand time doing it. It is one that the kids will love, having the appropriate mood at the appropriate time. They’ll love the humor and tremble delightfully at the scary moments. I totally recommend going to see this movie, but see the first two before doing so, otherwise you’ll be completely lost.

And read the books if you haven’t - they’re fantastic!

Addendum from Dad:

I have not read two paragraphs total from any of the books. I thought that Azakaban was extremely well made in most places. Thomas is right - the time-travel sequence was engrossing and included the kinds of paradoxes that time-travel stories have developed over the decades. This sequence is really the apotheosis of the movie.

The acting of the three principals - Harry, Hermione and Ron - is magnitudes better here than in the first two flicks. All three actors are older (teens now, actually) and their greater intellectual maturity is evident. It's not hard to envision Daniel Radcliffe (Potter) becoming a real action-movie hero in a few years; he is developing into an actor with the physical presence and agility to do so. The thought also occurs that Emma Watson (Hermione) might someday be a Caucasian Halle Berry.

Azkaban is as good flick, somewhat grimmer in places than the first two, but that content works well because now the three youths, more grown up, have to confront grown-up issues. Their world is one of magic but not fairy tales. Urgent matters of life, death, danger, justice and compassion must be confronted with insight, skill and above all, courage. And yes, as Thomas said, Harry is compelled to confront who he is, especially in relationship to his father. This thread of the story is done with great sensitivity, I thought, and was never maudlin.

This is the only one of the three Potter films I would see again in the theater rather than wait for DVD.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/5/2004 10:45:37 AM.
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Remembering Torpedo Squadron 8
Yale University Professor David Gelernter decries the fact that today America's great battles are not known to most children and many adults. Such as the Battle of Midway, begun 62 years and one day ago. The professor quotes renowned naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison's words about Torpedo Squadron 8:

Threescore young aviators . . . met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.

The squadron flew off USS Hornet, one of three American aircraft carriers to fight the battle. (USS Yorktown was sunk, but the Japanese lost four carriers and never regained the offensive significantly.)

The photo to below shows a torpedo attack against a Japanese carrier during the Battle of Coral Sea in May 1942.

All the squadron's pilots and crewmembers except one died. Pilot Ensign George Gay alone survived, shot down, floating the in the water among the enemy fleet, where he watched the subsequent destruction of three Japanese carriers. Rescued later by a Navy PBY amphibious airplane, he said that as the Japanese carriers blew up from attack by US Navy dive bombers he thought to himself, "It's the end of the world and I have a ringside seat."

The dive bombers got through to blast the Japs because Torpedo Squadron 8 had, unintentionally, pulled all the Japanese fighters down to wavetop height, where the torpedo planes flew. Torpedoes had to be dropped fairly low and slow, and many of the squadron's pilots were new, anyway, and could not fly fancy patterns and still hit the ships.

They all died, save the wounded Ensign Gay, because their lumbering Douglas TBD-1 "Devastator" aircraft were easy prey for both enemy fighters and ship's gunners. Armed only with a wholly inadequate .30-caliber machine gun firing to the rear, the TBDs never had a chance. None of their torpedoes hit the enemy ships.

Their weapons struck no targets. Yet by the fortunes of war, these brave men - Admiral Nagumo watched them admiringly, saying, "They fight like Samurai, these Americans" - did not die vainly. Coincidentally, American dive bomber squadrons under command of Lieutenant Commanders Max Leslie and Wade McCluskey arrived far overheard in their Dauntless dive bombers, a very accurate weapon. Japanese Zero pilots were wave hopping after other torpedo squadrons that had also attacked. (All torpedo units suffered very grievously; only five of 41 torpedo planes survived the day).

With no fighters at altitude to oppose them, the Dauntlesses peeled over and literally within minutes turned the Japanese carriers Soryu, Kaga and Akagi into flaming wrecks. (The Japanese were forced to scuttle two of them June 5; the US submarine Nautilus sent the other to the bottom.) Only Hiryu escaped damage in this attack. It retaliated by sending planes to attack the American carriers. The Japanese struck USS Yorktown severely and left thinking they had sunk it. Briefly abandoned, damage-control parties reboarded and soon had the ship controlled to the point where she could be taken under tow.

The last Japanese carrier, Hiryu, was attacked June 4 about 5 p.m. by planes from USS Enterprise and some from Yorktown about the same time Hiryu's planes were attacking Yorktown. Hiryu took four bombs onto loaded flight and hangar decks, causing colossal explosions that doomed the vessel. It was also scuttled June 5. On June 6 the Japanese submarine I-168 torpedoed Yorktown, sinking her. The destroyer Hamman, alongside Yorktown, also took a torpedo and sank quickly with great loss of life.

No American aircraft matched the Japanese Zero fighter at the time of the battle. The US Navy's Wildcat fighter could dive faster and possibly match other maneuvers, except climbing, if very skillfully piloted. But the Japanese pilots of the fleet were the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Almost all had years of combat experience in China, southeast Asia and elsewhere. They were not about to be outflown at Midway. Had they still been flying at their assigned patrol altitudes when the Dauntlesses appeared on June 4, there is little doubt that the dive bombers would have been savaged as badly as the torpedo planes actually were.

If that had happened, the torpedo bombers might have sunk a ship or two. But they would have been opposed not only by fighters but by ships' antiaircraft fire. Furthermore, American torpedoes of that time were notoriously unreliable, often failing to explode even on direct hit.

It was the dive bombers who destroyed the Japanese fleet on this day 62 years ago, but their smashing success was bought with the blood of dozens of torpedo plane crews. Torpedo Squadron 8 has become emblematic of them all because it lost the greater percentage. But Torpedo Squadrons 6 (Hornet) and 3 (Yorktown) also deserve our undying gratitude for their bravery and open-eyed self sacrifice.

Japan's losses were so severe that it never recovered. In addition to the four carriers, it lost several hundred aircraft. But worst of all, according to Japanese Navy fighter ace Saburo Sakai, it lost the very best pilots its navy had. There was no way to replace them.

Courtesy Strategy Page, here are the men who flew to their deaths in Torpedo Squadron 8 62 years ago today:

Lt. Commander John C. Waldron, commanding officer, KIA
Lt. Raymond A. Moore KIA
Lt. James C. Owens KIA
Lt.(jg) George M. Campbell KIA
Lt.(jg) John P. Gray KIA
Lt.(jg) Jeff D. Woodson KIA
Ens. William W. Abercrombie KIA
Ens. William W. Creamer KIA
Ens. Harold J. Ellison KIA
Ens. William R. Evans KIA
Ens. George H. Gay WIA
Ens. Henry R. Kenyon KIA
Ens. Ulvert M. Moore KIA
Ens. Grant W. Teats KIA
Robert B. Miles, Aviation Pilot 1c KIA
Horace F. Dobbs, Chief Radioman KIA
Amelio Maffei, Radioman 1 KIA
Tom H. Pettry, Radioman 1 KIA
Otway D. Creasy, Jr. Radioman 2 KIA
Ross H. Bibb, Jr., Radioman 2 KIA
Darwin L. Clark, Radioman 2 KIA
Ronald J. Fisher, Radioman 2 KIA
Hollis Martin, Radioman 2 KIA
Bernerd P. Phelps Radioman 2 KIA
Aswell L. Picou, Seaman 2 KIA
Francis S. Polston, Seaman 2 KIA
Max A. Calkins, Radioman 3 KIA
George A. Field, Radioman 3 KIA
Robert K. Huntington, Radioman 3 KIA
William F. Sawhill, Radioman 3 KIA

They saved the world. Not all by themselves, but they did save it, and you should know that, just as Prof. Gelernter said.

Update: Bill Hobbs linked to an earlier post of his that has more information, and some excellent photos, of the battle. There are links to other good sites about Midway there as well.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 09:30:59 PM.
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Two weeks, two Purple Hearts
Staff Sgt. Robert D. Whisenant, a squad leader with the 1st Cavalry Division, was wounded twice within a two-week period.

Whisenant was wounded for the first time April 29 while conducting an IED sweep along "RPG Alley."

"Just before midnight, a rocket-propelled grenade flew out of an alley from about 100 meters away," he recounted. The blast threw all the passengers to the floor and knocked out Whisenant. But he and the gunner got back up and returned fire. “I grabbed the 240B machinegun and we just started rocking,” Wisenant said.

Then, on May 6, Whisenant was hit again, this time by an IED.

"On the way back to our mission site an IED went off next to the left track of my vehicle right next to the driver," he explained. "It blew out our communications, knocked me to the floor for a few seconds. That's when I noticed that a piece of shrapnel had come up and hit me in the neck. I could feel it burning, so I reached up and pulled it out."

"I may be eligible for two Purple Hearts, but with 10 months left to go I'm not looking for three," Whisenant said jokingly.

Two close calls would just about peg my fun meter.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 03:21:05 PM.
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The danger of the "Ideal Time"
The ideological eschatology of the Western Left - why Islamofascism doesn't repel them

Eschatology is the theology of last things, the time when history reaches its final fulfillment. Of the world's great religions, only three are eschatological: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Christianity sprang from Judaism and Islam claims to be the true faith of revealed religion that Judaism and Christianity corrupted.

In all three religions the establishment of the end time is the establishment of the ideal time. It is when the present world is either destroyed so that perfect world can take its place, or the present world's corruption is excised and creation is purified and restored. Usually in Jewish thought, the ideal time has been the restoration of a free, independent Israel living righteously within the Sinai covenant. Jesus' disciples persistently asked Jesus when he was going to bring it about, to which Jesus basically replied, "God only knows."

The establishment of modern Israel did not fulfill this vision fully. The dream of the original Zionists was threefold: to establish and Jewish state that was (a) politically free within its borders, (b) independent of foreign control and (c) extant over all the lands of biblical Israel. To date, Israel has never achieved all three simultaneously.

Hence, there have been 12 attempts by Jewish terrorists to destroy the Muslim al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, which sit atop the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple. These Jewish eschatologists believe that there is a prophetic necessity to the rebuilding of the Temple, so the Muslim edifices there must be removed. This restoration dream is shared by many American evangelical Christians.

In Islam and most strains of Christianity, the ideal time is established after judgment of the dead and the living. The Apostles Creed (dating not to the apostles but to the end of the second century) says that Jesus will "return to judge the living and the dead." In Islam, of course, judgment is the sole prerogative of Allah, but many (maybe most) Muslims believe that Jesus will be assigned the task by Allah and will judge humanity as Allah's agent. In both Christianity and Islam, the ideal time includes no sinners, who are either excluded from entering the ideal community of righteousness or are simply destroyed. In either event, it is too late to convert once the judgment has begun.

When all three eschatologies are taken to the extreme, adherents deny the goodness and value of the present world. After all, why work to increase the value, beauty or goodness of the present world and its institutions if everything that now exists will be wiped away or transmuted by God anyway?

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracy of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, the latter internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm , only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can wrote them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure?

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally good, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. And now Osama.

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda views them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Update: In a comment to this post, FH recommends reading "Mephisto," on Belmont Club, and I agree. Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, whichn helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 12:56:38 PM.
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Gunners in Baghdad
Via Blackfive, who's been or a roll lately, I learned of an independent film maker who spent a few months self-embedded in the artillery battalion in which I was a battery commander 20 years ago. It is 2d Battalion, 3d Field Artillery Regiment, aka the Gunners. The site is called Gunner Palace, named for the unit and for the fact that they are based in one of Uday's old palaces. This is an engrossing story and the online videos are incredible, especially the one of the junior enlisted soldier silhouetted by sundown, electric-guitaring the national anthem while gunships fly overhead. A must see.

Link to this post by Donald Sensing, 6/4/2004 08:49:54 AM.
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