From RedBlueRichPoor comes an excellent snap analysis of the election. Nothing much to say about it except read it.

From Calculated Risk comes a discussion of who the next Treasury Sectary will be. I am suprised to see Larry Summer’s name mentioned. I thought he was on a black list.

From Rod Dreher comes a story about a direct decedent of a slave voting for Obama. It drives home how much has changed in a short amount of time. Me being me, this kind of worries me. Rapid change can be for the worse as well as for the better.

From the Economist…

After storming into a police station on July 1st and stabbing six officers to death and injuring three others and a security guard, Mr Yang was shown remarkable understanding by China’s voluble internet users.

How do you pull something like that off? I can see stabbing one or two police officers to death. But 6?

Are the police in China so used to facing no resistance that they have no training or equipment to deal with one man with a knife? The article says that the police were unarmed, but still…..

From The New York Times…

On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.

The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.

Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed their quarry. A video made on a cellphone showed the six militants lying in the dirt, blood oozing from their wounds.

And why did the people of Buner take matters into their own hands? Because they did not want the Taliban and the Pakistan army to use their hometown as a battle ground.

Good luck to them. But I don’t think they will be able to escape. Still, one should never make the mistake of thinking that ever one in Pakistan is the same or that none of them are trying to avoid the catastrophe that is overtaking their nation.

From The Times…

In the time-honoured tradition of covert US operations in the Middle East, this one seems to have gone spectacularly wrong. The Syrians, who had agreed to turn a blind eye to a supposedly quiet “snatch and grab” raid, could not keep the lid on a firefight in which so many people had died.

The operation should have been fast and bloodless. According to the sources, Syrian intelligence tipped off the Americans about Abu Ghadiya’s whereabouts. US electronic intelligence then tracked his exact location, possibly by tracing his satellite telephone, and the helicopters were directed to him. They were supposed to kidnap him and take him to Iraq for questioning.

According to defence sources, when the four US helicopters approached the Syrian border, they were detected by Syrian radar. Air force headquarters in Damascus was asked for permission to intercept.

So what went wrong? For latter on in the article….

It is not clear what went wrong, but it is believed that the helicopters were spotted by the militants on their final approach and a gun battle broke out. That is supported by an account from a local tribal leader, who said a rocket-propelled grenade had been launched from the compound at the helicopter. The firefight blew the cover on a supposedly covert operation.

From Spiegel…..

He is the foreman of a working party and has been digging for the past eight months. During that time two of his friends died underground. One was electrocuted, the other was killed when the Egyptians released poison gas into his tunnel. Mohammed was there when the gas canisters burst. “We heard the explosion and crawled back as fast as we could. Imad was behind us, the gas got him.” He says a short prayer, and also includes the two men who died last night.

A little throw away line in a Spiegel article. Who cares if Arabs use poison gas to kill Arabs?

That is the problems with the critics of Israel. If they actually believed what they said they believed and they actually fought for it, they might be a force for good in the world. Instead, they have one standard for Israel, and another for the rest of the world.

From The Belmont Club…

In other words, it would have been better if Benes had just left things alone. Just two weeks after the magnificent last stand of the Anthropoids at the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a huge rally in support of the Third Reich was held in Wenceslas Square, as this video shows. The Nazis gloated that “terror has produced the desired results”. It did, even politically. Benes himself was taken to task after the war for launching the operation on Heydrich without considering the consequences on the Czechs. In the end, as Camus observed, it is always innocence and not guilt that is called on to justify itself. Guilt doesn’t give a damn.

The true test of your ideals is not what you achieve, but what you will give up to achieve them. One of the reasons that the Nazis conquered so easily was that no one in Europe was willing to give up very much in order to oppose them. As I argued in my essay “The Crisis of Authority,” World War II revealed how weak the ideals of much of Europe really were (and are). Only the communists where willing to fight and die in large numbers in the conquered nations (with the possible exception of Norway).

It is telling to read how many people consider such sacrifices a mistake even on a conservative blog like the Belmont Club. Here is one such comment….

Only in Communist-led resistance, where they gladly traded 1,000 innocent civilian lives to kill 12 enemy troopers, persisted. In the communist mindset, large casualties are acceptable because individual life is cheap compared to the importance of revolutionary macrotrends that are sought to be cultivated by partisan attacks and mass reprisals. Mao felt the same way as Stalin or Tito or their minions in France.

In one sense I agree with this. The communists most certainly did not value life. Nor do I wish to make the communists into heroes. But having as your highest goal the preservation of yourself and your family is no better. The natural result of this desire is to make any man who can credibly threaten to kill you or your family into a kind of God. If you insist on a certain chance of success before you will do anything you are saying that you will worship anyone who is sufficiently powerful.

What bothers me about today’s conservative movement is that there is so many people who are willing to boast about what evil things they would do to preserve their family’s life and so few people willing to boast that they would give up their lives and their family’s lives for their ideals even if that accomplished nothing.

The reason we have it so good in the west is that there were a number of people in our past who laid down their lives with no hope of getting any benefit for themselves or their families in return. When there is no one left who is willing to do that, the “west” will cease to exist in its current state no matter how powerful it is.

From Megan McArdle….

Even more shocking is that my grandmother, a rock-ribbed Republican who to my knowlege has never voted Democratic and will not let a bad word be spoken about George W. Bush in her hearing . . . that GOP-lovin’ granny almost voted for Obama. At the last minute, she decided that since she lives in Western New York, and there’s no chance of Obama losing the state, she could safely support her party. But that she even thought about voting for the Democrat augers dire things for the McCain campaign.

I would dismiss this anecdote accept that I have seen the same thing. For example, I know a firm supporter of the Republican Party whose opinion of African Americans would put him in the raciest working class white man category. He told me that for the first time in his life he has thought about voting for the democratic ticket.

Of course, I know firm McCain supporters. But it does not seem good that McCain is struggling to keep the support of people who voted for Bush two elections in a row and every other republican candidate previous to that.

A lot of lower income white males who are die hard republicans could support the war in Iraq as long as it was about killing people. But when it became about rebuilding the country it was harder for them to support it. There is too much stuff around them that needs to be rebuilt for them to be happy with hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent on a country that they feel will just turn against them in the end. Throw a trillion or so in bailouts for the banking industry when the manufacturing firms were allowed to go under, and you have the makings for some serious class resentment.

People in my area still miss those manufacturing jobs and they don’t understand why they left.