Baker-Hamilton Equals Doug & Dinsdale

You may remember the Monty Python sketch about The Pirhana Brothers, Doug and Dinsdale

At the age of fifteen Doug and Dinsdale started attending the Ernest Pythagoras Primary School in Clerkenwell. When the Piranhas left school they were called up but were found by an Army Board to be too unstable even for National Service. Denied the opportunity to use their talents in the service of their country, they began to operate what they called 'The Operation'... They would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money. Four months later they started another operation which the called 'The Other Operation'. In this racket they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them. One month later they hit upon 'The Other Other Operation'. In this the victim was threatened that if he didn't pay them, they would beat him up. This for the Piranha brothers was the turning point.

The Operation was to not threaten our enemies.
The Other Operation in the Middle-East, apparently, is to threaten our allies. Yeah, that'll work.
Bring on the Other Other Operation. Faster, please.

Beautiful Photos

I have added to my sidebar, in the Oddly Beautiful category with Jerub-baal and Liquid Sculptures, the following photographs. Amazing.

2006 Weblog Voting

The voting for best weblogs starts tomorrow. You can see the complete list of nominations here. Just reading the names of them is intriguing, and gives me ideas of places to check out.

I don't think I'm going to campaign for anyone, but I might list who I vote for. Some categories I won't be making a selection in.

Why Getting the Nobel Peace Prize is a Bad Sign

Few things please me more than when this self-righteous bastard (who I once voted for, BTW) gets exposed. Again.

Cosmic Economics

Gagdad Bob over at One Cosmos has a post, "Will Stem-Cell Research Lead to a Cure For Progressivism?" which relates to several of mine quite interestingly. My recent discussions of tribe, resources, and evolutionary psychology parallel some of his concepts.

“For millennia -- until quite recently -- human beings struggled to rise above subsistence because of a stubborn inability to recognize how wealth is created. Certainly into the late 18th century, people mistakenly believed that there was simply a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and that it was left to individuals and governments to fight over their share. Not until Adam Smith was it recognized that wealth can grow without limits, but obviously even now people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this idea.”

Now, Bob is one unusual dude. No doubt. But you can handle it.

Depression: Kindling

“Kindling” is a concept brought over from the treatment of seizure disorders. Once you have had seizures, your threshold is lowered, and you are more likely to have them later. This has been found to apply to depression as well. In extreme cases, this is of course your basic “Well, duh.” People who had been in concentration camps when young were more likely to be depressed when they were elderly, even if they had had no intervening episodes of depression. Well I’m shocked. In the 80’s and even 90’s in the psych biz, we thought that helping people “deal with these issues” beforehand would provide some protection. Great theory. It seems to make things worse, though. The idea that you have these issues lolling around in your unconscious, waiting to explode upon you, while you walk around untroubled and unaware, a walking time-bomb of psychic misery, is one of those half-truths that make psychology dangerous.

Putting off psychic misery isn’t necessarily dangerous. If you can put it off until you’re 90, you likely won’t have to deal with it at all.

But there is at least a half-truth in it, and it’s worth mentioning. You can have a highly stressful event send you into an episode of depression. A second highly stressful event can send you into a second episode. But the third and subsequent episodes may not require so much push. Once depression has been kindled, the path to it becomes easier. This is part of why doctors are often so big on trying to treat normal grief. They’ve been burned before, and wish they’d treated some of their previous clients more aggressively.

Sadness is not depression, but continued sadness can lead to depression. There is a current line of thought that says any chronic illness should prompt consideration of treatment with anti-depressants as a prophylactic. I’m not sure that’s going to hold up under investigation. It’s a theory. But I do know that one of the arguments against the practice is bogus. As I mentioned in my previous Kubler-Ross posting, there is this idea of grieving, or accepting, or dealing with any bad thing as a process. That immediately suggests that it is something you have to go through, and interfering with that is bad. “Don’t give her medication. She has to go through the normal grieving process,” they say. Well, there isn’t one. People grieve. They have many different emotions. As time goes on, they think about the terrible event less often. It still hurts when they do. There’s no process.

The body, including most of the brain, does not have much emotional vocabulary. The body does not perceive a difference between sad, unhappy, not happy, displeased, not pleased. It feels bad. That’s it. The higher parts of our brain create the subtle differences between those concepts. This is why parents are teaching culture when they teach emotional vocabulary. A four-year-old knows little difference between “sad” (inner directed) and “displeased” (other-directed). Parents teach that, and while teaching it, also give cues as to what is an appropriate response. “Are you sad because your friend is gone?” “You’re unhappy that the dog knocked over your tower, aren’t you?”

Depression is moving into different territory, where the lack of energy, changed sleep and appetite, or waves of sadness start to develop a life of their own. This can happen easily if you’re “just sad” about a death or a loss. The sadness, which is directed toward an event, can become the place the emotions go to live. Telling people who are already hurting that there is some “process” they’re supposed to be going through just adds to their burden.

Kubler-Ross Is Junk

Note: Killing time at meetings today, I got 122 European rivers. Took the whole 90 minutes, though.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief have firmly embedded themselves in popular culture. The idea that we go through some patterned, normal territory in response to crisis, especially death, seems to be attractive to us. It has expanded beyond the territory of accepting death, and is now applied to loss of jobs, pets, marriages, and I don’t know, maybe

There is no evidence that it is true.

Which is not to say that it is precisely false. It is so vague as to be difficult to disprove. Kubler-Ross herself taught that the stages did not necessarily come in order, and that not everyone went through all stages. Everyone goes through at least two, she thought. Because a dying person can get “stuck” at a stage, then all evidence can be bent to confirm the hypothesis. Are you sad? Well, that’s just the “Depressed” stage, then. Or maybe Anger. Are you cheerful? That’s Denial. Or maybe Acceptance. Or maybe some odd variant of Bargaining. It depends. It’s rather like reading the horoscope about your Sun Sign: “You are sociable, but you value your time to yourself.”

Try and think of a reaction to bad news that you couldn’t squeeze into one of the five stages.

Kubler-Ross is credited with bringing attention to the feelings of grief, and attention to the feelings of the dying. Before her book On Death And Dying in 1969, the story goes, the medical profession disregarded the feelings of the dying and the experiences of the family. Death was hushed up and swept under the rug. Doesn’t this strike you as fairly unlikely? In the era of house calls, ethnic wakes and funerals, stable neighborhoods and extended families, that the medical profession was less likely to notice the emotional and family needs?

If anything, the Five Stages of Grief sound like a replacement or compensation for other changes in the culture: people were less connected to churches, moved from neighborhoods and extended families, and went to hospitals to die. Along comes this nice little woman with a Swiss-German accent (so you just know you can believe her) who seems to genuinely care and has what you’re going through all mapped out. And she’s a doctor – did I mention her accent? And she’s talked to hundreds of dying people.

The idea is pernicious because it creates the idea that there's this "process" that can't be interrupted, or you're screwed. Limping anyway. You grieve. You don't go through a "grief process."

I was thinking this because we had the Employee Assistance Program people come in today to talk to us. They had heard there had been two suicides from our team over the weekend. Actually, there was one three weeks ago, and a death over the weekend that was probably accidental, of a patient who left three weeks ago. Details, details. They wanted to debrief us, and let us know that it was alright to feel what we are feeling, because it was normal. How would they know? I’m a heartless bastard who isn’t the least disturbed. I do have some sorrow for the families involved. Other than that, I’m just annoyed at having to go to more meetings. Is that normal and alright? If it’s Denial, then I never get out of that stage, and must be a pathological SOB. If it’s Acceptance, then obviously I’ve got this grief thing licked, rolling through the 5 stages in about 3 minutes.

We were encouraged to try and make something positive out of the experience. Gag. But I’ll dutifully do my homework. I’ll blog. Which I was going to do anyway. I’m not sure that telling you the uselessness of the conventional wisdom is what they would call “something positive.” I’d better come up with something else.

In Case You'd Forgotten

Interview With The Lord High Executioner Of Saudi Arabia

Really.

Attorney Albion Tourgee

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit makes an interesting comment about Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War, in the context of a biography of Albion Tourgee.

He had been a champion of racial equality during Reconstruction, but the U.S. public tired of keeping troops in the South and the national press painted Reconstruction as an unrealistic failure, leading to the takeover of pro-segregation forces and the enactment of Jim Crow laws. Tourgee continued to fight these -- with some support from Civil War veterans -- but it was mostly unsuccessful, setting the stage for long-term problems that affect America to this day.

Hmm.

For Young Parents

Many people keep photos and sentimental memoribilia of their family at work. Included in mine are two notes from my second son, probably from first grade.

HOPE YOU HAVE A BAD BITHDAY
HATE
BEN

And a language arts paper, in which he was supposed to make up three sentences on his own.

I went to the new store.
Who went with Jon to the fun, too?
Why are there two dead people in my house?

Seventeen years later, and he never did turn into a parent- or sibling-murderer. Things turn out okay, they really do. You’re just in the harrowing part now.

CS Lewis On The Media

Miss Hardcastle, a singularly unpleasant chief of the security police in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, corrects a rising sociologist. He has commented that while it might be easy to fool an uneducated audience, it must surely be difficult to mislead an educated reader.

Ah, you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?... But the educated public, who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re alright already. They’ll believe anything.

Not much has changed in 60 years.

December 2005 Archives

I confess I like a lot of the things I’ve written over the last year. Yeah, yeah, humble people aren't supposed to say things like that. Go figure, huh? It's not necessarily brilliant writing and thinking, but good thinking and good-enough writing. I reprised some of last November’s entries this November, and started checking December 2005 for things I might republish this year. I was surprised at how recent they seemed to me. Certainly it wasn’t a whole year ago that I wrote…

I liked so many of 'em I thought they would clutter up December 2006 if I kept bringing them forward, even with the trick of bringing only the title and first paragraph, with a link to the rest. Even though you could easily do it yourself on the sidebar, I’m making it even easier for you by putting the link here
starting with Using Humor To Tell Friends You’re Conservative. There are articles that didn’t please me much upon review, so you might skip the following: Medicare Part D, Global Wetting, and Requisite Apology.

Iron-o-meter Lost In Shipping

When I follow the Instapundit links, I sometimes find myself hopping through, link to link, and discovering interesting blogs. I clicked through to Feministe yesterday and read an interesting complaint about the lack of news coverage a dramatic event received. Feministe was outraged that a man had driven his car into a Woman’s Health Center on 9/11/06 in an attempted suicide, but the media had barely reported it. If it were an Arab or a Muslim, she said, it would be all over the news. But because it was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist, no one made much of it. She linked to one of the few stories about it. She complained about the three decades of extreme violence by antiabortionists

There was a comments section below that linked article, and some of the comments were stupid and hateful, as Feministe and her commenters had claimed. When I commented, I acknowledged that, and condemned the attempt to harm innocents. Because there was no report of deaths or injuries, I assumed that no one had actully been hurt. But just to check, I ran down the story as best I could.

Well, the attempted had taken place at 4:30am, so no lives were endangered. Feministe left that part out. There was no source in the news articles that the person was a Christian fundamentalist. Perhaps Feministe added that in. The comments section with the hateful comments also had hateful comments on the other side. Feministe left that out. I pointed all this out, more gently than I did here, and made several other critical but polite comments. I did not mention, but could have, that hateful comments are often plants or left by trolls, and may not actually represent the thoughts of an actual person. She took them at face value, and I didn’t challenge that.

I was expecting to be flamed, which can be amusing, but there was also a chance that there was a good response, or more information. So I checked the comment responses to see.

My comment had been deleted. Heh.

People can run their own blog whatever way they want, of course, and can make them a shrine to their own opinions and cheerleaders. But if you’re going to delete opposing comments, politely expressed, then the one thing you really can’t complain about is the media suppressing news. A calm or circumspect person might have noticed that irony.

Apparently delivery on her Iron-o-meter has been delayed.

Gwynneth Paltrow

I didn't even see a picture on the news story, and I don't think I remember what she looks like, but hers is a movie name I have actually heard of, so she must be big. I'm sure Ben and Bethany will bring me up to speed on that.

She thinks the table conversation in Britain is more intelligent and civilised than in the US. Well, that could be. Googling around, this is a woman who thinks of Madonna as her big sister and mentor, and who named her first child Apple, so one wonders how she would recognise it if the conversation suddenly elevated, but perhaps I do her an injustice. She might be bright enough but just strange.

The only reason it is worth bringing up at all is because people often make these ridiculous pronouncements without thinking much what they are saying. Making the same judgement in reverse would likely be just as ridiculous. There is a large difference in congeniality and simpatico between groups that you choose to spend your time with and those that you exercise less control over. When I was in college, a friend was trying to prove to me that the girls were much much prettier in Columbia, SC than in Manchester, NH. As evidence, he pointed to two young women walking across the street downtown. He stated flatly "I could go into a half-dozen clubs near my college and every single girl there would be better-looking than those two."

Well of course, you clown. Clubs are where attractive single people go, and they dress for it. He no longer noticed what the average woman in downtown Columbia looked like.

A highly responsible, diligent woman complained about "kids today." She thought that they didn't have the same drive and focus that kids did when she was in school. But the comparison group is her friends, a driven, responsible group. She no longer remembered what the average student at her highschool acted like. I have an advantage here, because I was enormously irresponsible, hung out with a wide range of people - including many who engaged in acts of stupidity and criminality. I remember them. My children's friends were far superior in character.

I get huffy when people complain about stupid and closed-minded Christians, because my mental picture is of my church and my Bible study, and they aren't like that. Well of course they're not like that. That's why I go there. Whenever I get thrown into groups of Christians where I don't have control over the guest list, I always encounter someone stupid and/or closed-minded.

Geek Test

Discovered via Tigerhawk.

I scored 24.45759% Geek, which is just short of Total Geek. Yes they do use that many significant digits.

I think the average here will run 15-30%

Over at innergeek

Demography Contradictions

There is considerable discussion in Europe and among Europe-watchers of the impact the birthrate will have long-term for European culture. In short, Europeans have a total fertility rate (TFR) below replacement level. The range is from extremely low in Italy and the former Soviet Republics (1.2 births/woman) to only slightly below replacement level in France (2.0 births/woman, where 2.1 –2.3 is replacement).

Making this more dramatic is that the birthrate for native Europeans is lower still. Immigrants have TFR’s well above replacement level. It is true that immigrant populations’ TFR’s move toward the host country’s rate in the first generation and approach it in the second, suggesting that there might not be a geometric effect. It is also true, however, that “native European” includes 2nd-generation immigrants from largely Muslim countries over the past decades, many of whom have not well-acculturated, the TFR looks even more ominous. I have said only half-kiddingly that in a generation, your tourguides at the Louvre and Versailles will be Algerians.

Americans have generally tut-tutted over this, secure in out TFR’s over 2.1 year in/year out. Many commenters, including some Europeans, have attributed these higher numbers to our increased religiosity. Even in Europe, religious people have a higher birthrate, and we just have a higher percentage of religious people here. I noted in passing in our discussion of Who Really Cares that conservatives have more children on average that liberals – unsurprising given that religious people are more likely to be conservative.

There has been ample speculation of the psychology of this as well, that religious people are more likely to anticipate a hopeful future and have more confidence in their ability to prepare children for whatever difficulties might arise – thus, more small persons in church.

The overall map of this new Conventional Wisdom is Europe will increasingly become Eurabia, unable to maintain its generous social supports without reliance on an increasingly numerous and culturally demanding Muslim population. In two generations, Europe as we know it (implied without acknowledgement: white) will no longer exist. Meanwhile, in those same two generations America will continue to grow, with liberals underbreeding and aborting themselves out of existence, while white conservatives gradually join hands with black Baptists, Latino Catholics and Pentecostals, and Asian Everythings to create a stable, multi-racial society while most of the rest of Western Civilization goes to hell in a handbasket. Nyah, nyah, nyah to all you uppity Europeans.

Not so fast. There are several other streams of data which call this into serious question.

The TFR in America for Whites is 1.8, African-Americans 2.7, Latinos 2.9. A considerable portion of the Latino group is 1st and 2nd generation. That TFR will drop. The other factor that causes TFR’s to drop is increased wealth. Not relative wealth, but absolute. No matter how much inequality increases in the iPod economy, absolute wealth will rise, driving the African-American and Latino numbers lower.

Without immigration, then, we are not likely to long remain at replacement level. I suppose that’s a moot point.

The 1.8 for whites is not very different from the 1.7 - 1.75 of Scandinavian women. Their robust numbers by European standards can be attributed to their pro-natalist policies, not their religious observance. The Scandinavian countries make enormous efforts to support parenting: lots of time off, lots of child care, tax benefits, guaranteed return to jobs for women. These policies were originally intended (at least partly) as feminist issues, to guarantee women’s ability to return to the workplace. Apparently, they do help keep the birthrate up, in defiance of the factors that we think do so in America.

If the Kay Hymowitz info is even close to correct, then the two-parent families – black, white, or Latino, are delaying marriage and children. The replacement-level TFR’s are a result of our more impulsive, less stable, less educated groups having more children. That has always been the fear of elitists and racists, of course. For at least a century there have been dire warnings that the unfit, poorer, lesser folk are having all the children and will soon outnumber we sensible people. Somehow the crisis has never hit, suggesting that a freer society allows people to escape perdition more than we expected. And that the unfit people are actually quite competent, thank you very much, despite our condescension.

Perhaps most interesting in the demographic projections is to note that this decline in birthrate has been happening gradually for two centuries. Whatever is driving that is likely to continue. (Because of the brief – 20 year – reversal of this trend after WWII, we are only now recognizing that the longer pattern is reasserting itself). The usual 3 nominations – life expectancy; improved childhood survival; wealthier, less agricultural society – are going to continue, whichever of them is the main “culprit.”

While it might be fascinating and darkly significant to contemplate that in 2050 in Italy, children will not have siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles, it pays to remember that this is 44 years away. I won’t be here to see it. A lot can happen between now and then, throwing the numbers into reverse or acceleration.

TCS Update

TCSDaily, which used to be known as tech central station, has more than an average number of fascinating articles this week. Economist Nathan Smith has an article



in which you will learn the difference between the Restaurant Economy and the iPod Economy. Amidst the complaints that inequality is growing in America, this article tells you why.

Computers and the internet, by reducing the costs of reproducing information, are making our economy less like the restaurant and more like the Ipod. In the Ipod economy, money buys more, but rewards for work seem crazily out of proportion.

In the interview with Bjorn Lomborg – and don’t you just intuitively know that a guy named Bjorn is both intelligent and fun? – the controversial Dane describes how the global warming discussion has deteriorated, and how the whole argument prevents us from doing environmental things that would be useful.



Stephen Bainbridge reports on how infanticide is drawing preliminary approval from the Church of England,



Josh Manchester describes that instead of the Pentagon’s 3 choices for Iraq: Go Long, Go Big, and Go Home, we should Go Native, and, and, and…

There’s lots of good stuff there, as always.

Killing Time With Geography

Boring meetings call for important time-killing strategies. I personally recommend geography, writing down your answers on the back of your powerpoint sheets. It takes enough thought to distract you, but can be interrupted at a moment’s notice to say “Well, but where do you draw the line?” or “We’re not allowed to express obvious contempt to that agency, are we?” without losing any ground. Naming the states is good, and having a go at the capitals is humbling at first. No one has ever heard of Jefferson City, MO except in the context of memorizing the capitals, so 45 years later, it’s hard to pull up. European countries are tougher than you’d think. There are now about 50 on official lists like the CIA and FIFA, because they include Azerbaijan, Kiribati, and now Montenegro.

It doesn’t take too many meetings before you’re up on this Azerbaijan and Kiribati stuff, really. You make your list of countries and get to what – 20? Then you leave the meeting and check on it and go “oh, Poland! How could I forget Poland?” and “Malta? Malta counts as a European country? I didn’t even know it was independent. I thought someone still owned it.” And at the next meeting you get 18 of your original 20, plus 10 you remember from checking the list…pretty soon you’re ready to move on to capital cities or start on Africa. (Africa will take more than a few meetings).

Rivers are good. For American rivers you can get a half-dozen each of White, Black, and Red. Animal names, state names, Indian names, and you have a flock o’ rivers already. European rivers – not so much fun. Even the English rivers aren’t always in English.

I used to do mental arithmetic, but that was when I still had the desire – and ability – to concentrate that hard. It seems too tiring now. I don’t recommend these games at all, in fact, unless need drives you. They do take some energy, and why waste that when you could be doing something enjoyable? But when you’re stuck somewhere, it’s worth the investment.

You had no idea I was this boring, did you?

Just Askin' - What "Everyone Knows"

Some questions start to generate multiple answers as soon as they are asked.

In our great divide in America, we do have general agreement that Iraq is key. Those who believe we should never have gone or should get out now think it is key because it is a focal point for the rest of the world, illustrating that the US is too ready to fight, doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, doesn’t understand the Middle East, etc. Those who believe we need to win think it is key because of American credibility, calming a key trouble spot, installing the beginnings of long-term solutions, etc.

What if it’s not key, one way or the other? I like to discover the questions that no one is asking. What we are all most sure of sometimes contains our greatest blind spot.

I am not making the claim that it isn’t central to international affairs for the next two decades. For good or ill, that is still the most plausible playing out of current events. I’m just looking back over the events of the 20th C, and noting that popular opinion about what was important hasn’t often turned out to be correct. The ending of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, as much as it was noticed in Europe and America at all, looked like a relief at the time, but actually led to changes in both countries that dominated the century. Victorious Japan did not get the spoils it felt it deserved, prompting it to ramp up to become a power that could enforce its will. Tsarist Russia was revealed as weak, leading eventually to its overthrow in 1917.

The Russian Revolution itself was considered important in Europe and America only in its effect on The Great War. In retrospect, The Great War wasn’t over and merely simmered for another 20 years before coming to a final conclusion in the Second World War, and the fall of Russia to Communism changed everything. In historical significance, sometimes the last shall be first and all that.

We thought of the outcomes of Korea and Vietnam as having enormous consequences, but their resolutions did not affect events as much as the fact that they happened at all. Stalemate and loss still led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I don’t know that victory would have hastened things that much. The difference was enormous for Vietnamese and Cambodians; the difference between victory and defeat is still large in American rhetoric and affects foreign policy. But once contained by our opposition in SE Asia, the big issues of the second half of the century for China have been 1) the Cultural Revolution, 2) the one-child policy, and 3) the embrace of capitalism. For the Soviet Union, it was the being drained and opposed in a dozen places that eventually brought them down, bankrupt and imploding. Stalemate in Korea/ losing Vietnam may not have been much different from winning Korea and Vietnam in the grand sweep of events. Showing up may have been the difference. (Again, it made enormous difference to those in SE Asia).

Laying too much against such speculations is futile, of course. Perhaps victory in Vietnam would have brought collapse to the USSR a decade earlier. Perhaps it would have increased the likelihood of their using nuclear weapons. Perhaps victory would have encouraged us to overt, rather than covert, military action in the other places we encountered marxist revolutionaries. I am not trying to prove what would have happened, but only standing back to observe what did happen, and how it doesn’t fit our usual descriptions. Chile in 1973 was on the brink of revolution, and all since in South America may have gone just as it has even if we hadn’t involved ourselves in it (Note to my younger readers: Chile is still a very large issue in the minds of Boomer leftists. The mythology of a functioning marxism which was delivering benefit to the downtrodden, brutally interrupted in its cradle by fascist America, has proved impervious to discussion. The idea that our behavior may not have changed things one way or the other is intolerable to contemplate).

So with all that caution in mind – the humility to admit that we might not know what the big events are in any era – let’s look at Iraq. We’re spending a lot of money there – that’s big, of course. All eyes are on us, which is the natural result of everyone being sure this is very big. People are dying. This has to figure prominently in the moral balance scale – to some it is the only moral issue. But we don’t know if it has much practical effect long-term. Many more people are dying in Darfur and Zimbabwe. More people may be dying in Muslim terrorism in northwest China, though the Chinese suppress that news. Which deaths are actually going to be part of a change for better or worse, and which are just the bloody tragic waste, pain spilled uselessly on the ground, that has been the history of humankind?

That we have sent lots of soldiers and are spending lots of money is rather an automatic. That’s the way that US does war now. We may decide in 20 years that Iraq was a small war that we happened to spend a lot of money on, in an effort to minimize deaths. Sending a few thousand insurrectionists may have had an almost identical effect. Certainly, if the cynics who claim that the Sunnis and Shias have to eventually slug it out until they get sick of dying are correct, whether we do well or poorly may not matter much. If things calm down, both sides of the American divide will say “see, I told ya.” Ditto if things get more violent: “see, I told ya.” If things drag on as they look now for ten years, is that a bad thing? It depends on whether we decide in retrospect it was necessary. If we need to create a holding pattern while demographics and internal struggles in Islam play themselves out, then it is worth it. If it isn’t necessary, then it is worse than a senseless waste.

Or it could indeed be the introduction to the End of the World. We don’t know. Step back and run the various possibilities for the next twenty years through your thought.

Of course, this guy says I'm dead wrong, and we might hope he knows what he's talking about.